That reputation is a competitive edge for companies and people who embrace PHP. They get shit done for the business and grow revenue while the rest of the tech community is rewriting basic tooling for the 50th time in Rust on a Kubernetes-powered back-end with a React front-end powered by a GraphQL API layer.
To make things worse, this cannot easily be fixed because the implementation is a hodge-podge of ideas and functions. You cannot find good architecture people who want to work in PHP to clean it. It cannot easily be re-architected because it captures a lot of business wisdom. And business people (rightly) suspect pitches for a new built-from-scratch solution: sure, it will be fast and maybe it will be reliable; but will it solve their problem? will employees need to be re-trained? etc.
It reads like you're talking about a specific project and trying to generalize?
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3r90iy/faceboo...
Which I am not blaming PHP for specifically, but rather that “you say PHP sucks but Facebook made a lot of money” is not an argument and is particularly dumb for Facebook specifically.
And the personal attacks are really not ok.
This of course is coming, like usual, from someone who spent a significant portion of their life in academia and then moved to R&D and still has yet to make a dent in the world, or likely their student loans.
As an unrelated example, almost anyone can now do their own accurate temperature and blood pressure measurements, so the vast majority of temperature measurements is done by those with no medical training. This does not mean that nurses and doctors who do the same measurement (that a middle school student can do) are any less skilled in medicine, let alone "non-educated simpletons".
There seems to be an implication that an org using PHP has not also hired good software developers. Or that a good software developer would not use PHP.
My logic skills may be a bit rusty at this point, but I suspect that's what altdatathrow was reacting to.
My take of the GP was more that they believe the _strength_ of PHP is that businesses that don’t have an existing pool of SWE talent can start solving problems with more or less whoever they can get their hands on (I’m trying to be careful not to imply that the “whoever” here is a poor engineer - just that they might not necessarily need to be experts).
Then when those projects get traction and start to grow and an engineering org starts to grow and mature around it (with plenty of “good” engineers, whatever that means), the _weaknesses_ of PHP may come to the forefront, making maintaining & expanding the PHP project difficult.
The “framework du jour” and the set of best practices have changed way more often in PHP than in any other language, perhaps as much as, or more than Javascript.
That has not been my experience. When I used to work with that tech stack, the major framework choice only ever had 3 options:
Zend Framework, Symfony and Laravel.
From what I hear Laravel is the industry leading and there's no sign of that changing.
Sure there are other less popular frameworks just like in other languages.
> The “framework du jour” and the set of best practices have changed way more often in PHP than in any other language, perhaps as much as, or more than Javascript.
PHP have had a published standard specification for framework and component interoperability for long time now:
Sure, but this is not about personal experience, but rather about history. Maybe it just happened before your time? Also, please read my reply in context.
Pretty much every other language that's similar in purpose and popularity is provenly more stable regarding framework popularity than PHP.
Sure it feels great to bash Rust and Kubernetes or whatever like the GP poster did, but PHP suffered from the same problems until very recently, whereas Python, Ruby, Java and C# among others did not.
Even Javascript has been historically more stable in the backend than PHP: it's been pretty much just Express from almost the beginning, and other contenders never reached much popularity.
huh? that sounds like a contradiction in terms.
* Yes, I should have said "integrated" in PHP instead of "written".
*We didn't re-run benchmarks after fixing edge cases