what in God's Name could you do in PHP that you can't do in a modern framework?
You're telling me today with LLM power multiplier it's THAT much faster to write in PHP compared to something that can actually have a future?
And for what its worth, Typescript scaling, although better than PHP is still somewhat of an issue and If you want to have massive scaling, Elixir/ (to-an-extent gleam) are developed for solving the scalability problem especially with Phoenix framework in Elixir-land.
So I guess, jack_pp comment's about PHP can also be applied to an degree towards Typescript as well so we should all use elixir, and also within the TS framework the question can be asked for (sveltekit/solid vs next-js/react)
I am more on the svelte side of things but I see people who love react and same for those who love PHP. So my opinion is sort of that everyone can run in their own languages.
Golang is another language to be taken into consideration especially with Htmx/datastar-go/alpine.
You can stop there! Sounds like PHP worked for them. Already doing better than 90% of startups.
You can use persistent DB connections, and app server such as FrankenPHP to persist state between requests, but that still wouldn't help if DB is the bottleneck.
rows = select all accounts
for each row in rows:
update row
So PHP worked perfectly, but the DB is slow? Your DB isn't going any faster by switching to something else, if that's what you think.
PHP is the future, where React has been heading for years.
Only true if none of the DB accesses are about stuff that could live as state across requests in a server that wasn't php. Sure, for some of that the DB's caching will be just as good, but for others, not at all.
In most cases you could add a shared cache to fix the problem - e.g. put your shared state in Redis, or in a file that is synced across servers (if its kept as state in a long running process it cannot need to be updated frequently).
Unlike python or ruby which break right and left all the time on updates. you have to use bunkers of venvs, without any security updates. A nightmare.
PHP can scale and has a future.
You use python docker images pinned to a stable version (3.11 etc), and between bigger versions, you test and handle any breaking changes.
I feel like this approach applies to pretty much every language?
Who on earth raw dogs on "language:latest" and just hopes for the best?
Granted I wouldn't be running Facebook's backend on something like this. But i feel that isn't a problem 95% of people need to deal with.
If the update breaks things, you go back to the old venv. If the update goes well, then you just delete the old venv.
Not implementing security updates the right way is just human laziness and has nothing to do with the language in use.
python people don't update their libs, because then everything will break right and left. so they keep their security problems running.
Once something works in Python (which uv now makes trivial; before it could be a pain), updating 3rd party packages rarely cause breakage. But yes, I think many who use it hardly update, because things usually continue to work for years and the attack surface is pretty narrow[0]. Heck just a few days ago I checked out a project that I hadn't touched in years, which I wrote in Python 3.7; updated to 3.13 and it continued to just work. Compare to PHP which has a far higher attack surface[1] and often has breaking changes. I've heard a couple nightmare stories of a v7.x -> v8.x move being delayed because it required a serious codebase rewrite.
[0] https://www.cvedetails.com/product/18230/Python-Python.html?... [1] https://www.cvedetails.com/product/128/PHP-PHP.html?vendor_i...
Python has the curse of spaces or tabs and JS has the curse of npm.
They are in the same group, similar pedigree. If you were programming purely for the art of it, you would have had time to discover much nicer languages than either, but that's not what most people are doing so it doesn't really matter. They're different but they're about as good as eachother.
Deploying to production is just scp -rv * production:/var/www/
Beautifully simple. No npm build crap.