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Comment by littlestymaar | Hacker News Reader

I find it pretty fascinating that what used to be a beginner-friendly language, with limited capabilities but that is very easy to get started with, has now evolve to a bloated monster full of advanced features that you can't expect to know entirely, with a complex framework and tooling ecosystem to support it.

PHP lovers generally don't like acknowledge that, but the PHP we've learned back-end development two decades ago is no more and that it's now as beginner unfriendly as Java was when we picked it.

It's a pity because there's nothing as beginner-friendly anymore. I think the blame is on people calling themselves “PHP developers” who never bothered learning more advanced languages after PHP and instead pushed PHP to reach parity with those, at the expanse of losing its soul.

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You can still write the old PHP4 way in virtually all cases. <?php echo('hello world'); ?> works fine.

I've done so periodically, and every time I go "this sucks, gimme the tooling".

Sure, and I'm still using PHP every once in a while for personal needs (I have a handful of small personal websites built this way: PHP has this insanely cool capability of being just a scripting language for a basic dynamic website).

What's sad is that it's not how people use and teach PHP today.

PHP's magic really is that you can write small scripts super easily to do small tasks, but somehow most PHP developers insist that “no PHP isn't for building small scripts” but “a real, professional back end language ready for mission critical enterprise requirements blah blah blah”, because surely that make them sound more serious as programmers, missing the point entirely…

(And sorry to all insecure PHP programmers out there, but for serious stuff using PHP is still equivalent to coding with handcuffs and you should really learn a second programming language at last because being a one trick poney really isn't as cool as you think it is).

I picked up php a couple of months back after 30 years of ignoring it, mostly after reading a comment somewhere about using php for shell scripting. Very easy to read the language documentation on php.net and get moving. Powerful standard library. I haven't found another language (not an exhaustive claim) that offers language documentation as helpful as php's for a beginner.

Yes, the presentation of the documentation is very good. This is something I miss when I have to switch to other languages.

I also use it to write CLI scripts to exchange data between programs. The wealth of extensions and good UTF-8 support are a plus.

PHP is still definitely a beginner-friendly language that is still very easy to get started with. Setup is as trivial as it always has been, copy a .php file onto a server and you’re good to go. No complicated frameworks or “deployment process” needed if you don’t want them (and most people don’t need them).

The difference between it and Java is you’re not forced into the ClassObjectGetterSetterPropertyHookFactoryBean paradigm with PHP. You can continue to write concise, simple, elegant scripts that read from top to bottom and serve one page and serve it well. You don’t have to use any of these crazy newfangled features - I, for one, will be using none of them, and will be sticking to my if-else blocks and nested for loops that will be easy to read and grok when I (or someone else!) come back to the code two months down the line.

I still do, every once in a while when I'm using PHP for my personal websites, but it's been a very long time since I've updated the (very basic) dependencies I'm using since they all migrated to the “enterprise-grade tooling of the day” after 2010 or something.

While PHP can still be uses like that today (and is still unmatched in terms of ease of use for simple stuff when used like that) it's been a long time since the PHP project and developer community stopped caring about this use-case.

Java doesn't force you into that paradigm either. Well, most of it. Your code is still contained within a method within a class.

If you write JSP, you don't even need that.

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