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A very pragmatic reason exists: deployment is dead simple for users with very little technical skill. Deploying PHP software is as easy as subscribing to a shared web host (expensive or not, but most will make your life easy), connecting using FTP/SFTP, and extracting a ZIP file into the main directory. Some hosts even skip the last couple of steps and let you apply a template with a well-known PHP CMS to get you started. Hey presto, you have a functioning web shop, business website, charity home page, or whatever other thing you want. There's a (PHP) app for that.

In comparison, other programming languages are hard to figure out. Python, Ruby, Java etc all need some kind of a package manager to install dependencies (PHP apps are self-contained) and need to have the correct runtime version installed (PHP just needs to be in the general neighborhood of what's required, since most broadly used packages seem to be written in a backwards compatible fashion). This is scary and unfamiliar, and highly technical. If you're deploying on a VPS (because rarely anyone has managed Python/Ruby/Java hosting services), you've now also become the sysadmin with full responsibility for the box, including patching and downtime. Compared with shared PHP hosting, it's bonkers.

So true. The time to market is unbeatable in PHP.

Not a fan, but that is definitely a very good argument.

This argument may have worked in the years before Heroku (or Docker even) but it’s really outdated in 2021.

Then you have the myriad of static site hosts that also take 2 clicks to host something without even having to write any code.

You must have not worked with small non-profits with zero technical expertise and zero budget for hiring a consultant/permanent paid staff. Heroku is overcomplicated, and Docker/static sites (or the command line/running a server of any kind) might as well be alien technology. Some orgs know just that little.

I don't see how PHP fits into your example either.

Who is writing the code in the first place? They're uploading existing code to a shared host through FTP but then who wrote the code? Is it a prepackaged Wordpress? But then Wordpess hosts already exist.

If the developer is giving them a zip to upload, why can't the developer handle the deployment as well?

You moved the goalposts so far that the example doesn't make any sense anymore.

Does this really hold true in an App Service world? Just load your repo and go.

I'm talking about the kind of small org that doesn't know what a software repo is - zero technical experience at all, except for the very basics.

> Hey presto, you have a functioning web shop, business website, charity home page, or whatever other thing you want.

If we're talking about simple templates to open a store or a simple landing page there are so many no-code options like Wix/Shopify/SquareSpace/Square that I don't think PHP offers any significant advantage.

I believe at least one of the options you listed is actually built with PHP (Shopify).

Shopify is Rails actually. I think Magento and Prestashop are PHP

Shopify is famously a Rails application no?

Yes

Perhaps, but you don't have to know or care about that that to use it.

Same with WordPress. You install it (or have it installed) once, and then never think about what language it's written in.

Shopify is famously a Rails shop, but it is likely that a couple of the products on that list are built in PHP.

It's not that hard to get deplatformed, but yes, I can see your point. From an operational ease of use perspective they are strictly better than PHP, at the expense of trusting the providers to do the right thing.

I'm a PHP fan, but I think the following needs clarification

> package manager to install dependencies (PHP apps are self-contained)

PHP has Composer, which is one of the best things to happen to the ecosystem. Chances are, the piece of software you install will manage its dependencies in this way, and I'd be reluctant to install it if it didn't, as you wouldn't be able to update the software easily.

It does, but it's mostly transparent to the user. I've never had to think about it when I was installing WordPress.

When you start on a minimal server installation setting up LAMP to the point that wordpress doesn't complain is just as much work as setting up RVM/Node and Passenger to run whatever language you want.

All shared hosts already come with LAMP pre-configured. You just plug already supplied credentials into the WordPress setup page and that's it.

So does ex. heroku for all the other languages, and that actually scales. As well as most shared hosters offering node and rails.

Don't get me wrong, my whole point is that this 'simplicity' is given in any ecosystem these days.

Except live coding via FTP is something you consider part of the simplicity, then you are stuck with PHP :)

This is not accurate. While some shared hosts offer node or rails you will be limited by memory and it might not even run your app. The reason PHP is so good for shared hosting is that it runs per request and when you have rarely visited PHP application it requires basically no resources. You can have 100s of small websites sharing resources that get few visitors a day on single server and it will be fine. Try doing that with node or rails which are application servers that need to run all the time.

Heroku is fine but imagine you are agency managing 50 small sites. Heroku is like 7usd month minimum? You can pay 350usd month for Heroku or put it all on 20usd VPS and result will be same.

That's why all self-hosted CMSes worth something are in PHP world and there are very few in python/rails/node.

Also its not like PHP devs have been living under a rock for 20 years and don't want nice things. Git deployment is offered even by many shared hostings, people use SFTP+rsync, or things like https://deployer.org/. And there is very active market of server management tools like https://forge.laravel.com/ https://ploi.io/ https://moss.sh/ that combined with attributes of PHP will give you your own little super easy heroku.

And scaling... well most people don't need scale, you scale CMSes by caching anyway. And you can run pretty big scale just on one machine. And if you want automatic extreme scaling it's not like you can't do that with PHP https://vapor.laravel.com/

I was just using generic examples.

However the way rails apps works with phusion passenger is exactly what you are explaining. I can run hundreds of apps next to each other on a tiny VM. Once a app is loaded I don't have to rebuild the state on each request, if it is not needed anymore (or rather another app needs the resources more) it gets unloaded again.

Setting up passenger, nginx and git for pushing is also a job of 10 minutes max.

I get there is a market for PHP, I too recommend wordpress when I don't want to code something for someone. I just don't see it's 'simplicity' as argument.

I think there's value in a large, established ecosystem.

Languages tend to go through a few years of flavour-of-the-week fads (think of the Vue/React/Angular competition, and all the also-rans that we can't remember now). If you get in too early, there's a fair chance you'll bet on the wrong ecosystem, and end up with unsupported dependencies or difficult to maintain code. In the worst case, you scrap the whole thing in six months and write it for a new framework to keep it alive.

PHP went through that phase back when "we've got to support IE6 users" was a legitimate talking point. You can be reasonably confident Wordpress or Laravel are here to stay.

PHP is also fundamentally a hugely battle-tested platform. It's been ran on 486s in the broom closet, and entire rack clusters in data centres. If you have some performance or usability problem, there's a good chance someone else has had it already and worked out a solution. With some new language, your odds of "never seen that before" errors are much higher.

jQuery changed my life.

These days I write server code in C++ :(

Why so sad, that sounds like a huge improvement over webdev. Modern C++ is a joy to work with.

How is PHP 8.1 an “older car”? Have you looked at the language and runtime recently? I hear stuff like this from people whose latest PHP knowledge is based on that ancient fractal of bad design article.

Yes, I have. I recently programmed PHP after 10+ year break from it and while some things were fixed many of my old issues with it remained. I would not recommend PHP to anyone unless they have an existing code base in it.

> I don't really understand the reasons for using PHP outside of that people are already familiar with it and like working with it or want to find jobs in that area.

I look at it this way sometimes: there are the interpreted languages, the VM-based languages and then systems languages.

PHP is a good option in the "interpreted" languages category, if your problem domain is web-based, as it includes a lot of built in functionality for web-based problems. It's also open-source, reasonably performant, has an improved type system, has a C-like syntax and enjoys features inherent to a scripting language e.g. fast startup time, so would be a good option for lambdas.

Finally, one of the features that has been unreasonably good about PHP is the shared-nothing request model, which makes running a website on PHP a stable experience, in an imperfect world of weird state issues and libraries that might sometimes have a bug that leaks memory.

There are also other options in the "interpreted" category which I would fully expect people to also look into, however that's not to say PHP isn't a good contender for this space, given learning time is a limited resource.

However I would expect people to know a VM-based language and a systems-based language (or at least a bit of one) in addition.

If you like PHP, great.

Do you plan on creating a start-up that you intend to scale to a babillion customers? That you intend to hire teams of developers for? Probably not a good idea.

Are you a new programmer trying to figure out which language to learn first? Absolutely not. Python, Java, JavaScript, C# are much more flexible if nothing else. Anybody who tries to convince new programmers to learn PHP is doing them a great disservice.

Except Facebook literally did that :)

But I agree with you.

Wikipedia too. And probably many WordPress websites with a lot of traffic.

If anything, PHP has proven it works in this regard.

Facebook and Wikipedia were both founded ~20 years ago, think they would make that same decision today?

PHP works, but imho starting a new company or career with PHP is a mistake.

I don't know, why not?

Why would it be a mistake?

On the one hand I have a few examples of huge, successful projects written in PHP and I know they are still around 20 years later and haven't been rewritten in another language. I use projects in PHP on a daily basis (Nextcloud, Rainloop, Wordpress) that work well and have been maintained for years. On the other hand I have a few comments calling out PHP without convincing arguments. Something is wrong.

I practice Python and Javascript daily, I've written PHP code 10 years ago, still use some of my code. I occasionally update PHP code on a website I manage. I've seen good things in the new versions.

Should I begin a new project today, I would not rule out PHP that fast. I like Python and Typescript, but PHP projects are often a breeze to install (unzip, done) and survive system upgrades and reboots easily as long as php-fpm runs. Projects in other languages need more babysitting. I know, I also use web software in other languages, including one I author.

PHP is dead simple to write too.

I would probably go for nodejs for something that requires Websockets or SSEs (or a compiled language). Otherwise, I'd seriously consider PHP because it does not require setting up something like uwsgi or celery, write reverse proxy rules, write init service files or running Docker. Put the files in www and it's done. Also no code for managing routes, the file system organization does this for me. No memory leaks, everything is thrown at the end of each request. The architecture is robust.

Couple reasons:

* It's waning in popularity, new programmers aren't being taught and there isn't a lot of incentive for them to seek it out * Other languages are also good at making websites but many are more popular and more flexible - machine learning, video games, front-end web development, enterprise services (and sure PHP can be "enterprise" but many new cloud/apache projects are java first)

So yeah, I'm not saying PHP is dead...just that it's not a good investment for new developers and it's questionable for new projects.

Also Slack, Etsy, Baidu (4th most visited site on the planet), Box, MailChimp, Spotify to name a few more that seem to be doing ok.

Yep, almost 20 years ago and it's been both a technical and hiring problem for them ever since.

Is there any large tech company without technical and hiring problems?

Why make it worse by choosing backend-only web languages with bad reputations?

> Anybody who tries to convince new programmers to learn PHP is doing them a great disservice.

It depends what location you're in. In Europe there are pockets where PHP is very popular, where learning it can open up the job market.

> Do you plan on creating a start-up that you intend to scale to a babillion customers?

Not interested in PHP in the slightest, but how is this myth still going around?

Wikipedia, Pornhub, Facebook (initially at least) were all built on PHP. There are hundreds of other examples.

Laravel nowadays has an outstanding reputation and I doubt it's performance is lagging so far behind Django for example.

More generally, after all these years I still need to see a story of a startup that failed because they chose the wrong stack. There are some blog posts with spurious claims in this sense, but really, when has a startup with good product-market fit and a finely designed product ever failed because they chose PHP instead of something else?

Those startups you mention are 15+ years old, would they still choose PHP today?

Maybe you haven't heard of startups failing because of choosing the wrong stack, but I'll wager you don't hear about most startups failing because...why would you? Also, have you heard of startups re-platforming? Either because the current stack is falling apart or the company is acquired by a bigger fish and they need to integrate with other services so parts end up getting rewritten to Java/C#.

The fact is PHP is good for making websites, and that's all you'd really want to do with it. There are other languages that are good at making websites and they are more popular and have other benefits.

If you are building things with PHP and it's working for you, then awesome. But seriously, why encourage it?

> If someone is new to software development and in an area of the world where it's not mostly PHP shops, so bigger cities

In Europe there is a lot of PHP. Even in the bigger cities. And as someone who knows a lot of different programming languages, modern PHP with Laravel is pretty hard to compete with on a productivity basis.

Not a completely fair comparison. Then at least also tell readers that the 'old cars' you talk about are not in the museum or on the junkyard, but make up half of all the active cars on the road. That's not nostalgia.