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Comment by nsonha | Hacker News Reader

every figgin web dev topic, popularity does not evidence merits. It's just a shitty language that existed at the right time when web technologies were booming.

When more options become available, people stop choosing PHP.

And please don't reply with js, like "but PHP is better than shit", that's a real high bar.

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PHP was / (is?) hacky but there's no denying the very good culture of "getting stuff done" (and monetizing it) around it.

Precisely because PHP was always used and is still used in the front-line trenches of the web where business needs are always the #1 concern. Its used by small to medium businesses, professionals, individuals to run their businesses, communities and so on. There isn't any room for overoptimization, there isnt any room for wasting the non-existent VC money in developing questionable features, there isnt any room for any complicated setup that could cost time, which actually means money.

For that reason its also the most successful front of Open Source where an actual thriving ecosystem was able to develop on it through freemium business formats like in WordPress ecosystem. The plugin ecosystem of WordPress was estimated to have $1 bn volume a few years ago. And its quite streamlined in providing software and services at scale to the point of providing ordinary users and small businesses with features at price points they would not hesitate to pay. It does constitute an example for the rest of the Open Source world could follow or at least learn from.

> There isn't any room for over optimization, there isnt any room for wasting the non-existent VC money

that is not the merit of PHP itself, more like characteristic of the period (when tech salary hasn't yet been inflated and consumer devices' computing power has not yet become abundant).

Was hacky. It's awesome now.

What exactly makes PHP 8 shit?

But what makes it good? It's fast, it uses low memory, it has a great package manager, it has great backwards compatibility, it has a huge ecosystem of libraries, it is easily integrated with other technology, it scales, it has an easier learning curve, it's easy to hire for (although it has been getting harder).

> (although it has been getting harder)

Its likely getting harder because PHP has developed its own specializations in the form of frameworks. Laravel is one, WordPress has become another. People look for 'Laravel developer', not 'PHP developer'. Or, 'Wocoomerce developer' -> not 'WordPress plugin developer', not 'WordPress developer', the least, not 'PHP developer'.

Specializing in one of such emerging specialization fields pays !much more! than just developing on PHP, so it will become more difficult to find PHP developers into the future. Especially the WordPress enterprise ecosystem sucks a lot of WordPress/PHP developers out of the contracting market into high-paid, long-term jobs.

No typed variables, no generics, threading/async is hard(er than other languages).

[This is coming from a long time PHP dev who actually loves it.]

no one has discussed it a million times on HN, so I don't exactly know

Ah, I see you’re just saying jt sucks just because the cargo cult says it sucks. Thanks for clarifying.

The cargo cult says it sucks AND I say it sucks. There is no “because”. Maybe if you’re better at logic you would be able to code languages other than PHP.

This reply is hilariously elitist.

> When more options become available, people stop choosing PHP.

Probably rare but I had task to rewrite Node API to PHP because of deployment...

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