This seems like a desperate attempt to justify not moving on from a language whose death knell rang a long time ago.
You might as well try to convince me I should start my next business with cutting edge software written in Fortran or COBOL.
You might as well try to convince me I should start my next business with cutting edge software written in Fortran or COBOL.
The point is not to prove that one language is better. For the most part, for web development, there isn't much difference in productivity for a programmer competent in the language between (JS/NodeJS, PHP, Python and Ruby) Java is a little more heavyweight for pure web development but if you have a bunch of backend services that need to be reliable you will find the type system to be of help.)
What is more important for productivity is a deep familiarity with the frameworks, and tools -- the IDEs CI systems etc. that you need to build and deploy your solution.
The other important thing is the ease with which you can hire programmers for that language in your market. Here in India finding PHP programmers is easier than say finding Kotlin programmers but harder than finding Java programmers. But that is not the case in other markets like the US. There is also the issue of perception of candidates. If like you, a large majority of candidates think the language is legacy, you'll end up having to pay more to hire them (because they will be harder to find -- most of the extra cost will be search costs not salary costs.)
To the extent that the PHP community can convince folks that it is not a legacy language (and it really isn't) that is good for not just the language but the overall tech community. And this article furthers that goal well.
You’re getting ready to launch, and you’re going to need a marketing site and a site with documentation and help articles for users. Do you write that site in Go?
Hell no. You hire someone cheaper whose skillset isn’t systems programming or ML, and they spit out a templated site in a weekend that looks sleek and makes a good impression, and when you need more content you tell them and they turn it around in an hour, and you spend your time on the Go stuff.
And that market, the market for Good Enough sites that front Really Good products and are fast to work with: that’s a great market for a lot of people who want to sling some code, get things done, clock out at 5 and spend time with their kids in a nice house in the suburbs. That’s why for people who want that kind of life, I recommend learning some PHP (or rather, learning the super-common frameworks that use PHP).
Hum... Probably. (I personally have a thing or two against Go, but yes, probably.)
Is the site some empty generic marketing that you'll put up to fill a feature list or is it meant to be useful? On the first case, sure, go offshore to somebody cheaper.
But on the second case, the time you can waste due to language, framework, software architecture and every other technical aspect is almost irrelevant near the time you will spend creating content. And you can't offshore the content if you want it to be great.
Yes! https://gohugo.io/ would be a great choice for that kind of thing.
And if you want to integrate Hugo with anything, Go is the way.
Even with a standard Hugo set-up, most content is in Markdown files, so one could also just train someone from marketing on how to edit those. Not exactly rocket science.
I mean most of the marketing websites are build with such PHP tools.
Honestly if all I needed was a marketing site and a place to host my documentation, I would 'write' it in something like Squarespace.
But if you need a site spun up for something and it's not the main focus of your business, shooting for the middle of the market makes a lot of sense. Wordpress is super easy to set up and create pages on, and there are tons of people with expertise in it. It's the kind of thing even non-programmers can administer, which makes it accessible to people who have skills in other stuff like marketing or social media management.
I was more thinking if you want to build an interactive site, what is the go to Go web framework?
Along the same lines with the Wordpress example, I'd choose Ghost for that as I come from the JS end of the spectrum also. I wonder what the Go based options are here? If I ran a Go shop I'd probably lean towards that (unless, of course, they're all horrible :)
But the trend didn't continue. People did it for a whilw, but then moved on to other models which still worked for PHP because few apps really need live data and concurrency like that.
The problem for PHP is that the reputation for being "a dying language" stuck.
I added more value to a tech agency and their clients with PHP than several of the senior Java guys did combined. And they were talented. Just set in their ways and lacked a focus of getting things done and adding value.
They'd waste time overbuilding shit that nobody used because it was interesting to them, not that it would create value for the client or end-users.
Also, I took over several large Node projects built by hipsters and they are the messiest code bases I've ever seen. And I've inherited a lot of trash PHP ones over the years.
Regarding the concurrency thing with PHP - ReactPHP is very nice, PHP 7 and on performance gains were massive, and real-time (search, chat, etc) can be better handled by Algolia/Pusher/etc anyway.
The Node hype train had a great run. And I still like Node. But PHP is the language of getting shit done.
it's quite a nice language, and for many many cases is certainly fast enough these days.
Not that I would not also prefer node over PHP ... But that is mainly because of C/C#/Java familiarity and frontend code reuse/familiarity than anything else.