2020's fastest-rising tech jobs? Programming language PHP leads the way

https://www.zdnet.com/article/2020s-fastest-rising-tech-jobs-programming-language-php-leads-the-way/

by mg • 6 years ago

247 262 6 years ago

mg2• 6 years ago

There is a lot of good things to be said about PHP. Personally, I do not go along with the typical critique about it. Which usually points out edge cases of PHP's behavior which never have been a problem for me in real life.

At Gnod, we are heavily invested in PHP. And it continues to look like that was a good choice.

What I would like to see discussed more is PHP's decision of not having an import system but to instead use a "namespace" directive in included files. This puts the burden of avoiding name conflicts on the included file rather then on the including file. While in Python and Javascript it is the other way round. Which in my experience makes things more logical and requires less tooling for an enjoyable coding experience.

Buttons840• 6 years ago

I don't know PHP very well, and don't understand what you mean. Are you saying if I write a library in PHP it's my responsibility to avoid name collisions with future user's code (some of which might not yet exist)?

hibbelig• 6 years ago

It’s similar in PHP and Java: you use the reverse domain name as a namespace.

mg2• 6 years ago

Exactly. You are supposed to chose a name for your namespace that hopefully nobody else ever used and nobody else will ever use.

If you write a class "Http" you might start your file Http.php with

    namespace Buttons840;
    
    class Http {
        ...

So a file that includes your Http.php can instantiate the class via

    $myHttp = new Buttons804\Http();

cutety• 6 years ago

Also, unfamiliar with PHP, but a few years ago I somehow ended up maintaining/managing one or two reasonably trafficked Wordpress sites that some (untechnical) friends put together, so every now again I get to learn how weird some shit in PHP is. And it’s that time again, because the comment about name conflicts was confusing as I could’ve sworn that during couple times I’ve had to actually poke around PHP code I saw it had namespaces. After some quick googling though, I was able to confirm a) PHP has “namespaces” and b) they seem to work like most other “features” (i.e. not like you’d expect if you’ve programmed in anything but PHP) [1].

However, C has the a similar convention [2] (though the convention is — as far as I’m aware — for the sake of maintainability/readability as the compiler has no problem telling the difference between to things named the same, the person reading it probably will. While, as I understand it, PHP will just overwrite anything with the same name in the file/lib you include).

It seems like PHP is heading in the right direction, but I have no idea why anyone would pick it up or start anything new with it these days, I don’t care how well done and the nice and new stuff is, it’s the decade of utter mess it’s built on top of that has uninterested me. Don’t get me wrong, since “acquiring” the Wordpress sites I’ve gone from a blind PHP hater, to at least understanding/appreciating it (but still won’t actually touch it with a 10ft pole). PHP is brain dead easy to deploy and scale up, compared to ruby/python/node (which aren’t _that_ difficult to deploy), PHP is basically the web equivalent of a static binary, in that you can just drop in and it’s basically ready to go. PHP also actually really fast, it’s seriously impressive how fast it can render WP pages especially when you consider the absolute spaghetti/thrown together/clusterfuck code it’s running — Wordpress itself is pretty yikes from the code I’ve seen, but the plugins, Christ, the 50 million sloppy buggy poorly coded plugins — PHP can absolutely run laps around other a decently coded site in other languages (at the cost of having to use PHP I guess ).

[1] https://kornel.ski/en/phpns

[2] https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/q/404613

n42• 6 years ago

you're aware of use directives, yes?

  use My\Full\Classname as Another;

https://www.php.net/manual/en/language.namespaces.importing....

pavel_lishin• 6 years ago

Weird. I wonder if a major piece of software released a new version that required more work to update existing software?

mtnGoat2• 6 years ago

Magento, maybe. But I don't think it haa has the user base to drive numbers significantly.

otar2• 6 years ago

It's not a surprise at all.

Firstly, PHP has always been around, WordPress based websites still have like 1/3 share of all existing websites.

Secondly, in the recent years it got a very mature language, got loads of improvements and performance optimizations. With PHP 8 being planned to be released by the end of this year, it will be another major step forward.

Thirdly, Laravel, Symfony and other open source stuff are awesome.

I think if PHP does a major comeback as a decent platform for development and somehow gets rid of the undeserved reputation, those PHP devs who stayed with PHP and didn't switch to RoR, Django, Node or other platforms will be winners, including me :)

altdatathrow3• 6 years ago

somehow gets rid of the undeserved reputation

That reputation is a competitive edge for companies and people who embrace PHP. They get shit done for the business and grow revenue while the rest of the tech community is rewriting basic tooling for the 50th time in Rust on a Kubernetes-powered back-end with a React front-end powered by a GraphQL API layer.

keanebean86• 6 years ago

But the new stack is 12% faster!!!!*

*We didn't re-run benchmarks after fixing edge cases

johnnycerberus4• 6 years ago

I understand what you are trying to say but Kubernetes and React complement services written in PHP, the former can deploy and orchestrate them while the latter offers an option for SPA apps written in PHP. Also, Rust when written where it should be written, can enhance PHP services that require fast and secure components. But yes, trying to replace what PHP is good at (serving content) with Rust is not really the best thing to do.

ratww2• 6 years ago

I understand the sentiment, but historically there has been a lot more web-framework churn in PHP compared to other languages.

The “framework du jour” and the set of best practices have changed way more often in PHP than in any other language, perhaps as much as, or more than Javascript.

ptero4• 6 years ago

PHP allows folks without a strong background to solve some simple business problems which, in general, is a good thing. But once the project exceeds a certain complexity threshold (which I admit many business problems never do), this approach hits a wall: things break and fixing it breaks more things and it is an uphill battle to move in the right direction. Adding a significant new capability -- forget it.

To make things worse, this cannot easily be fixed because the implementation is a hodge-podge of ideas and functions. You cannot find good architecture people who want to work in PHP to clean it. It cannot easily be re-architected because it captures a lot of business wisdom. And business people (rightly) suspect pitches for a new built-from-scratch solution: sure, it will be fast and maybe it will be reliable; but will it solve their problem? will employees need to be re-trained? etc.

Minor49er• 6 years ago

Composer, Packagist, and PHPUnit are all excellent too.

Zak7• 6 years ago

PHP earned its reputation. Whether the reputation earned by previous versions is relevant to the current version is a different question.

I'm going to assume it's a decent modern language now, but what's the argument for using it instead of another mature dynamic language like Ruby or Python?

coding_lobster2• 6 years ago

I have no metrics on this but I was under the impression that due to the size of the PHP community the package ecosystem specifically for web is probably larger. The community itself being larger is of course another plus as it means you're able to get easier access to the knowledge of others.

Thirdly of course the shared hosting providers (by what I've seen in the past) usually support PHP almost always - this is not the case for either Ruby or Python.

wtracy4• 6 years ago

what's the argument for using it instead of another mature dynamic language like Ruby or Python?

A massive body of existing code that you can leverage.

I keep putting off picking up PHP, but when you look at the number of off-the-shelf easily-extensible solutions for CMSs, CRMs, and e-commerce platforms, there's no contest. PHP wins.

If anyone can point me at a Python e-commerce solution that will let you deliver an MVP in an afternoon, and your first original feature within a week, that would make my month.

hkt• 6 years ago

Unless I'm drastically mistaken, PHP is faster than both ruby and python. There's no consideration of what we call technical correctness, only business value, and on the whole that is a good thing.

a-saleh• 6 years ago

I'd vager Wordpress? Maybe Laravel? So not that different from choosing i.e. Ruby to do your business-focused monolith and get payed :)

hrktb• 6 years ago

PHP has been optimized to death so performance wise it’s excellent (same as javascript, it should not have become so fast, but the sheer amount of work done on it gives it an edge).

The other advantage over ruby (python too?) is the server models bootstrap and trash everything on each request, meaning way less weird memory issues and more predictable behavior.

Nowadays nobody’s gonna run a php server ad hoc, so it will be wrapped in a container anyway, but IMO it’s still easier to manage than ruby/puma.

Last but not least, it’s very subjective but I think php has better enterprisy trade-offs than ruby: you’re not free to rewrite the whole language but have a decent degree of freedom in writing code with few boilerplate. Ruby gives way more freedom which is not always an advantage depending on the work culture.

I say that having left php for ruby.

chrisweekly4• 6 years ago

The bad rep is totally deserved. PHP, for most of its existence, has been a profoundly bad language per se. That doesn't mean nobody's ever built anything valuable on top of it, and I fully understand that (much like also-justifiably-maligned JavaScript) it's evolved quite a bit. But the points made in this mid-2012 article are absolutely spot-on in describing precisely why PHP absolutely earned its reputation: https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/

jstummbillig• 6 years ago

Yes, but 2012 is 8 years in the past. Do you know what else is 8 years in the past? Well, not Reacts first release because that happened only in 2013. That's how long 8 years are in web terms.

At some point — and boy, are we long past that point — it feels old when gramps goes off about the woes of PHP4 because, oh, it feels like it's just been yesterday.

coldtea2• 6 years ago

The bad rep is totally deserved. PHP, for most of its existence, has been a profoundly bad language per se.

Javascript too, so what? In the end it's another tool with specific pros and benefits, and it got many things right (ease of deployment, no shared state, batteries included, etc).

innocenat• 6 years ago

PHP, for most of its existence, has been a profoundly bad language per se.

PHP is 26 years old. PHP5.3 is 11 years old. PHP7.0 is 5 years old.

Where is your cut-off that make you claim "most of its existence"?

post_below• 6 years ago

What does 'profoundly bad language' mean exactly?

When PHP was first released it was dramatically better than the alternatives for it's intended purpose.

There were plenty of things to complain about, but none of them stopped you from doing useful things with it. It was never slow or inefficient compared to other scripting languages, it didn't lack functionality.

Over the decades the most popular complaints have been addressed as the language has matured.

That it's remained in active development for 25 years with no signs of that changing in the future is one of it's biggest selling points.

I don't blame people for having issues with aspects of PHP based on their personal preferences and experiences, I get that, but that doesn't make it a 'bad' language.

There's nothing wrong with purist perspectives on what programming languages should be and how they should work. That contributes to better design.

But in the real world the questions are simpler: can this tool be used to develop applications quickly? Is it reasonably efficient at runtime (in this case in the context of scripting)? Can we easily find affordable developers in the future? Is there community support?

PHP checks the boxes that people building things want checked as well as any language and better than many. Unless I'm missing something, 'bad' here is more of a philosophical stance.

mrweasel• 6 years ago

PHP isn’t exactly an elegant language, and I would argue that you need to be an pretty good developer to write safe PHP code. Still PHP is easy to get startet with, well documented, productive and impressively fast for a “bad” language.

If you know what you’re doing I don’t see any reason to not pick PHP.

simias• 6 years ago

This back and forth appears in every single thread about PHP on HN:

- PHP doesn't deserve its bad reputation!

- Well, it used to be pretty terrible...

- Ok, so first let's talk about the relativity about the definition of "terrible". The Oxford English dictionary defines [...]

And from there it goes nowhere.

It is true that PHP improved drastically over the past decade or so, it is also true that it used to be a garbage fire of a programing language and ecosystem.

For the PHP proponents in the comments: I think you'd save you a lot of trouble if you didn't try to dismiss the history of PHP and pretend that it was just unfair criticism from haters. It was warranted. You can't win this one.

But who cares? If PHP really is good now you're way better off arguing about that, because while you'll never manage to convince me that it was a good language in 2005, you might end up convincing me (and others) to give it a try in 2020.

furyofantares• 6 years ago

The bad rep is totally deserved.

This sentence really got me thinking. "Deserved" is some sort of moralistic word, I'm not sure how it applies to a tool, unless it means to apply to the makers and/or users of the tool.

And I guess it makes some sense. A bad reputation is a sort of social communication utilizing shame and stigma. Maybe it causes people not to use PHP without having to pay the cost of really understanding why, which is likely only accessible with lots of experience and/or study.

This is basically by definition an inaccurate bias, of lacking nuance, but perhaps a net good. If PHP was such a poor tool for productivity and security then it was probably good if shame and stigma were helping people to use better tools without paying the cost themselves first.

But it's always very frustrating if you actually know what's bad and what's good about a thing, or even just know that it has both bad and good parts (even if you don't know precisely which is which), and you see a memetic belief held up as truth rather than acknowledged as a useful heuristic.

And while it feels dirty, maybe this shame and stigma also serves to influence the creators of the language and its ecosystem to make it better. I don't know. I hope there are better ways than shame and stigma but I'm just a d00d writing a post on a web forum.

What does seem clear to me, though, is if is a good tool NOW, as a result of years of work by the people who kept at it, then a bad reputation is no good anymore; no longer a positive force but a negative one.

lhorie• 6 years ago

PHP, for most of its existence, has been a profoundly bad language per se

I mean, people often say the same thing about C, C++ and Java. But these are also massively popular languages, so obviously they're doing _something_ right and the people complaining must be looking at the wrong metrics.

skee0083• 6 years ago

2board.net is written in php and it's one of the most popular sites on the world wide web.

cblconfederate• 6 years ago

Depends on how you used it. I ve barely noticed a change, in fact thats why i use it

Aeolun9• 6 years ago

in this mid-2012 article

Don’t you think referencing something 8 years out of date, from when PHP 8 was PHP 5 may be a bit out of date?

AQXt• 6 years ago

"PHP is an embarrassment, a blight upon my craft. It’s so broken, but so lauded by every empowered amateur who’s yet to learn anything else, as to be maddening."

https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/

hda111• 6 years ago

Undeserved? Not really. Tell me another programming language that needed 3 tries to introduce a MySQL escape function. The future is Elixir/Phoenix or maybe also Python/Django. But probably not the pile of unmaintainable Code PHP leads to.

mgkimsal5• 6 years ago

The future is ... Python/Django

I don't normally do a 'ha ha' sort of post on things like this but... 'ha ha'. WTF?

That's a future with one hell of a long past that has not even begun to take over a small subset of mindshare. Python/Django is not 'the future' for anyone except current Django/Python devs.

xwdv• 6 years ago

If I must work with a bad language, I'd rather choose Javascript over PHP any day.

megous8• 6 years ago

Actually, I often choose PHP over JS, because it has a lot more included in the basic runtime. The stuff I'd have to manage the dependencies for personally in JS, I have access to right away in PHP. Things like email message header formatting/quoting, PDO/database access, curl (easy to underestimate curl, but it supports much more protocols than just HTTP), XML parsing, DOM, CSV parsing, .... A ton of small things that add up in the end to an easier experience, when throwing together some quick project. And all these functions are standard, documented, dependable (all of these are there since 2006 or so, when I started using PHP, at the very least), and don't involve having to pull anything from an internet over npm that can be abandoned at any time by the uploader.

mrfusion• 6 years ago

How’s the Django job market these days?

jrsj2• 6 years ago

I don't really see how PHP catching up to improvements that were made in other ecosystems suddenly makes it a better choice than it's competitor though. What is it actually better at? And as a developer, why should I bother with it when it probably has the lowest average salaries of any web technology AND isn't going to help me get shit done faster than several other tools that pay above average?

closeparen2• 6 years ago

I’m not a PHP programmer but I used to be. It’s hard to overstate the simplicity of the deployment model. Your competitors will spend tens of thousands of person-hours chasing their tails around Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, Ansible/Puppet/Chef, etc. while you spend 15 seconds FTPing your source code around. LAMP stack achieved the “serverless” dream before many of today’s engineers were even born.

superasn• 6 years ago

Thirdly, Laravel, Symfony and other open source stuff are awesome.

I think PHPs biggest feather in its cap is Composer.

I can't even line a single script without it now. It really changed the usefulness of the language for me by many times.

rbg246• 6 years ago

Composer has changed my life as well, so incredibly powerful.

I love the patches package that can be combined with it, allows me to patch contrib modules or Drupal core in a controlled and transparent manner. This alone has changed my developer life.

_0w8t2• 6 years ago

As a maintainer of small Wordpress and PHP forum installations I tried to use PHP for system administration scripts to avoid extra dependencies. It worked at the end surprisingly good, but only after I wrote quite a few lines of glue code to get sane behavior from PHP.

The biggest surprise was that on Linux one cannot call an external process directly. At least with PHP 7.0 one always has to use an intermediate shell and one has to use extra functions to escape strings safely.

So yes, PHP works, but defaults are insane and to make things secure and robust one has to use extra libraries.

megous8• 6 years ago

https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.pcntl-exec.php

mekster2• 6 years ago

Choosing a language isn't like trading. You don't win by sticking to one. You rather lose by not knowing the strong points of each without trying any others.

ReptileMan• 6 years ago

For me the real php gem has always been Slim.

ksec• 6 years ago

Thirdly, Laravel, Symfony and other open source stuff are awesome.

Most people talk about PHP the language but not its surrounding ecosystem. Yes The language run time went through lots of improvement, proper JIT landing in PHP8. But That is like talking about Ruby on Web Development without talking about Rails. ( Like it or not Rails easily represent 80%+ of Ruby's Web usage )

Laravel took everything that is good on Rails and its surrounding Ecosystem, ( Auth, SearchKick etc ) and packed it together. And the productivity I saw from those using it as a whole were amazing.

There are also a lot less ideology with Laravel. And try to provide decent usage in all usage scenario. Compare to Rails which is more of an DHH / Basecamp's framework.

I mean if Elixir and Phoenix LiveView dont pick up some mainstream usage I did imagine PHP with LiveWire will be making a come back.

I sometimes wonder if anyone had made something like CooffeScript, or Scala or some other language that runs on PHP run time with some sane syntax ( Excluding Hack )

master_yoda_1• 6 years ago

A bogus report.

mtmail• 6 years ago

Any insight why or how the report is bogus?

archgoon• 6 years ago

Perhaps. What is your reasoning or evidence?

marcosdumay• 6 years ago

When you get a report of something reasonably stable, like the job market, with many changes greater than 100% upwards or 50% downwards, it's automatically suspicious.

It's even more suspicious when there are multiple non-niche categories with near 1000% or more of change.

But then, if this happens at some time, this year is the best candidate. I'm personally hold any conclusion for when I see independent confirmation.

zach_garwood• 6 years ago

Will PHP for food

PTOB• 6 years ago

... and certainly not for pleasure.

iainctduncan2• 6 years ago

I suspect this is driven by the fact that a boatload of small companies suddenly had to get their businesses online in a hurry. By number of websites and e-commcerce platforms for small businesses, PHP is massive. By amount of use in +$1M ARR established tech companies, it's miniscule. Covid no doubt drove a lot more of the former this year.

mtnGoat2• 6 years ago

Can you provide evidence of this claim that profitable/large companies don't use PHP? Or just parroting unfounded php hate.

coding_lobster2• 6 years ago

I wouldn't say it's unfounded but anecdotal. And I wouldn't necessarily call it "hate" either. PHP definitely isn't one of those technologies that you see often on job listings of major companies - sure they might use it for some things such as blogs but it's rarely part of the stack of their staple products. The question isn't whether they use it but to what extent and in what products.

wtracy4• 6 years ago

Facebook's codebase is overwhelmingly written in PHP.

If the F in FAANG doesn't qualify, then I don't know what does.

AaronNewcomer3• 6 years ago

This is silly. Lots of large companies use php for their internal applications. I built a php based backend for one of the largest sellers on amazon, in php. That company is approaching $1B in annual revenue.

Php allowed my team to move amazingly fast and deliver what the business needed very quickly. In e-commerce and dealing with Amazon specificity, rules and methods change monthly and you always have to be able to quickly pivot to remain competitive and I think php was a big factor in allowing this to happen.

rococode• 6 years ago

I'm curious, is there any particular aspect of PHP that helps you build things faster than you might be able to with other languages or frameworks?

jmknoll• 6 years ago

What specifically about php enabled the team to move faster than if you’d used used something like Rails, Django, or Node. (Assuming this was some kind of web-based internal app, since you were using php)

partyboat15863• 6 years ago

For someone who has mostly used Node, Typescript and C# .Net what could Php offer me?

mgkimsal5• 6 years ago

I'd done an order taking/processing extranet system 20 years ago, in PHP, at we did around $1b/year. No one was doing that amount at that time (well, info wasn't available anyway if they were). This was all PHP. PHP4 to be precise. Had done an earlier iteration in classic ASP, but ended up needing more servers to accommodate growth. Moving to PHP, we were able to reduce the server count.

Now... this was naive ASP - all the session state was kept in memory. There probably would have been a way to not do that, but no one where I worked knew how to do that (or even thought in those terms - it was just "set a sticky bit on the load balancer!".

The PHP code was slower than the ASP, but because the session state all went to disk, the memory usage never got too high. We still ended up using the sticky bit on the load balancer, but there was far less concurrent memory usage (IIRC servers had either 256m or 512m). We could serve more - slightly more slowly - via PHP.

The upside was that it was a known user-based - contractor/dealers buying from the company - so we didn't have to deal with "well, we might get 40,000 browsing visitors tomorrow because of a TV ad". The user base didn't fluctuate wildly, so it was easier to manage against.

By comparison, in the same company, another team of people were working on a Java web app. It would often take them 15-20 minutes to recompile/redeploy something to a test server to try out an idea to get feedback on something, whereas with the PHP, I could put code on a test server for feedback in a few seconds. (could usually do that with the ASP too). Yes, no doubt, the Java people were "doing something wrong" and someone can say they'd have known how to do it "right" in the year 2000, but... it was what it was.

iainctduncan2• 6 years ago

It's not silly, looking at this is literally my job. Perhaps minuscule is an exaggeration, but it's really darned small. I audit tech companies getting purchased for $2M to $1.5B, average prob $50-100M. We see very little PHP aside from say the company website. In the 50 I've done in the last two years, I'd say 3-4? And they were tiny shops. I haven't seen anything with more than $5M in ARR built on PHP. The majority of successful mid-sized tech companies are still .Net and Java. After that, Ruby, Python, Node. (Although tons of Python in the ML space for them now, which seems to be the obligatory buzzword tech ...) Hardly any are using PHP in their real production apps. Yes, I know you can come up with a list of exceptions, but there are a metric tonne of tech companies out there and the majority are unglamorously making money out of the public eye on .Net or the JVM.

Note: I am not saying they should use C# and Java - just that they do. I was a Python dev for 15 years before doing this, and I was very surprised to see how dominant those still are in companies over 10 years old and over $10M in revenue. And the bigger the company, the more likely it is be on C# or Java. I think every one I've seen going for north of $100M was at at least mostly on them (i.e. they might have a few services in Go or Node or something too, or some model engine in a niche language). Once a company is into the land of bankers selling it to other bankers, a lot of decisions get made for "safe" reasons, like ease of hiring good developers, enterprise infrastructure support, well audited security, and so on. And from the perspective of the investment firms, that frankly makes a lot of sense. By the numbers, most successful tech companies are not particularly exciting places to work anymore.

outime• 6 years ago

This aligns with my anecdotal experience. I started with PHP more than a decade ago and every company I've worked for (very large, large and medium-sized) has migrated away from it or never touched it. I don't see any sort of renaissance but if PHP has gotten really better as I read many times here (didn't bother to fact check as I abandoned it many years ago) then the market will speak. I don't see that happening yet in my experience.

Alex3917• 6 years ago

Also, most tech companies have presumably stopped hiring junior developers. So if you just taught yourself how to code and want to get a job as a developer, doing WordPress or Magento for some family business might be your best option right now.

barrenko• 6 years ago

I'm exactly in this basket. Most of the ads have been cut down to C#/Java and PHP shops (in my relatively small European market).

tootie• 6 years ago

Most of the SMBs are opting for platforms like Squarespace, Shopify, Hubspot which are proliferating. Building decent landing pages, lead gen, e-commerce are now push button.

AznHisoka• 6 years ago

I am not sure what methodology they are using but to have an old language like php rise that much in popularity makes me think something went wrong with their analysis.

johnnycerberus4• 6 years ago

Languages evolve and PHP did it and still does. PHP is as old as Java. Haskell is even older. In the category of PHP, Java and Haskell we pretty much rehash the same language features with some minor twists in new languages. Hardly we get new features that make an impacts like in the case of Go's goroutines or Rust's borrow checker.

The problem is the runtime of the language, on which PHP, the language, runs. That could be easily improved on porting the language to a VM like Facebook did with Hack or to something like GraalVM. Runtimes over languages.

brlewis2• 6 years ago

There are 55k openings on Indeed for React jobs and 8k PHP jobs. When the absolute numbers are lower, there's more opportunity for high percentage growth, which is what they used to rank them.

drbojingle• 6 years ago

React is a library for a language that no one can avoid for front-end development.

PHP is a language among many languages which can be used on the backend. JS, Java, C#, Python, Ruby, Elixir,hell even Perl has a web framework. Not really a fair comparison.

5cott0• 6 years ago

ZDNet? C'mon hackernews.

Wronnay• 6 years ago

I switched from PHP to TypeScript and then Kotlin because in my area companies moved on from PHP to newer technologies.

(And I am not the only one, I know lots of people which switched from PHP to other languages)

That's probably the reason for a pay rise - many developers switched from PHP to other languages and now companies which still use PHP have to pay more for the few PHP developer

darthrupert• 6 years ago

Bullshit.

nickthemagicman2• 6 years ago

PHP got way better with version six and seven.

I would avoid Jobs maintaining legacy PHP 5 or earlier like the plague.

otar2• 6 years ago

PHP 6? :) It never got released...

nickthemagicman2• 6 years ago

Oh haha, I jumped on board at 7. Well that skilled release just means it's like night and day from some of the 5 stuff I see.

johnnycerberus4• 6 years ago

I'm an experienced JVM developer (mainly Java & Scala) and I had to accept a freelancing project in which one administration component was written in Laravel, a PHP framework. To be honest, the codebase was pretty clean, I could easily understand what's going on, I've used phpStorm as my IDE since I'm used to the feeling of Jetbrains tools. Managed to hack and do the changes in just one week without any prior PHP knowledge.

Would I build something new with PHP? Now, I wouldn't. It is not that bad as a language to hack on Wordpress or small websites with Laravel but beside that, it is hard not to choose JVM or Node as platforms for your future projects.

Maybe a PHP implementation built on GraalVM will enable PHP to call into JVM libraries. GC and other things will be provided for free, though I think it will be some work since the majority of PHP is native code and its syntax is quite messy.

qsort• 6 years ago

As a relatively inexperienced JVM developer I pretty much share this view. It's true that PHP isn't PHP 4 anymore, but everything else moved forward as well, Java 11 is a fine language that I have few complaints about.

Since you mentioned GraalVM, I'm also pretty excited about the Graal nodejs runtime. I'm a fan of using JS/TS for quick projects, and unifying the runtime would be huge, I hope it will continue to be supported.

sroussey3• 6 years ago

PHP doesn’t need GC, unless you have some long running process which is generally quite rare.

artiscode• 6 years ago

I don't find it surprising at all. Almost 17 years ago I got into programming thanks to how simple and easy PHP was. Last time I wrote PHP was back in 2013, however I do not hold any grudges. Low entry barrier in learning the syntax, setting up a development environment, and testing it by typing a filename in the URL, how cool is that? It seemed super cool to me as a tech savvy teenager. I was able to start making money from odd programming jobs just six months later since PHP was in high demand.

webel0• 6 years ago

The tone of this article (plus my experience on indeed) suggests that a lot of these roles are for larger companies, not for little companies who are suddenly online and need a FT/PT web dev.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a shift in job listing behavior that caused a sudden influx of php job listings on indeed. So it isn’t as if the jobs didn’t exist before, they just weren’t posted on Indeed.

The salaries discussed (77k) doesn’t suggest that a surge in demand is pushing up pay.

k__• 6 years ago

Lately I get all of my projects directly from customers who approach me first and these project have nothing in common with the stuff I find on those job boards or get offered by recruiters.

The projects I get directly are of much higher quality that the public offers, but I also ask myself how much such numbers reflect reality. I mean the dark figures could be totally different.

arnvald• 6 years ago

Aside from PHP itself, the headline drew my attention:

2020 was a good year to be an entry-level candidate for technology jobs

Not sure what's others' experience here, but from what I hear in various markets (mostly within EU) is that fresh grads generally struggle this year, no matter the technology.

Companies put hiring on hold and if they resume it's primarily for more critical roles (read: senior positions); it's harder to get a job or even internship as a junior developer.

Am I in some kind of negative bubble?

bigdubs• 6 years ago

Depends what area companies operate in, but where I work (https://blend.com) we're doubling the team again this year and are starting to hire new grads again. Data point of one obviously.

maxlamb• 6 years ago

I assume this quote is US centric, so yes right now there is probably a substantial difference between US and EU in the demand for entry-level developer jobs (that pay a decent wage).

nefitty• 6 years ago

Junior roles are really cheap, and the quality of what many people are achieving continues increasing. I think it has to do with the by dance of self/directed learning resources and improvements in boot camps and other programs.

lewishogan• 6 years ago

My experience has been fairly matched towards yours, I'm a recent Computer Science graduate who's been told a fair number of times that a lot of places just aren't sure if they want to be hiring at the moment.

vorhemus• 6 years ago

It's a simple question of mass market: How many companies need (and are willing to pay) performance optimized C++ services? And how many need a plain old website and a simple admin interface to add some text?

AndyMcConachie• 6 years ago

Proving once again that there are only two kinds of programming languages.

Programming languages that everyone hates and programming languages that no one uses.

okareaman• 6 years ago

Are people who write Excel macros real programmers? Do Powershell or Bash scripts count? Is PHP a terrible language? These seem like not smart questions that language snobs like to ponder. Real programmers use Haskell I guess. I recently ran across this article about why you shouldn't hire .NET programmers that really rubbed me the wrong way. https://blog.expensify.com/2011/03/25/ceo-friday-why-we-dont... I'm fluent in many languages, like most programmers, and use the right one for the job.

adamredwoods• 6 years ago

I use it every day and I'm not a fan. Normally I'm language agnostic, whatever your infrastructure supports, I'll adapt to what you use.

The largest problem with PHP is how objects use arrow notation, arrays use arrow notation, strings use dot concatenation, and variables use dollar notation. Then I switch to JS or Java and it's all different.

As far as the stack for FPM and process managers, I think it works well, but I do enjoy the elegance of Node's event-driven environment.

tonymet• 6 years ago

that’s the largest problem ?

tasuki3• 6 years ago

The largest problem with PHP is how objects use arrow notation, arrays use arrow notation, strings use dot concatenation, and variables use dollar notation.

I think those are PHP's smallest problems. Semantics more important than syntax.

irrational• 6 years ago

Is PHP on a path to become the COBOL of this century?

greyman• 6 years ago

No, it will stay, since a lot of projects are written in it, also new ones. It will stay "forever" like C or C++.

tasuki3• 6 years ago

I don't get the "no" part: I think you're in perfect agreement with "irrational". There's heaps of COBOL that's very much staying. People are getting hired as junior COBOL developers in 2020.

setr• 6 years ago

I mean, COBOL is in the same boat -- there's too much code written in it to outright kill it. They still update the language standard today (2014).

The main migration argument I see is usually along the lines of "50% of all COBOL progammers today will be DEAD by 2025!"

Rather than about technical/financial merit (anyone willing to migrate on those grounds, and believed it was even possible for their infra, will have already done so)

user2834• 6 years ago

Needed a new job this year. I looked for a job in Elixir and couldn't get hired. Expanded my scope a bit and got hired for JavaScript and PHP in my highest paying job yet. Not exactly my favorite languages, but hey, it's what the market wants to pay me for.

tasuki3• 6 years ago

I used to write PHP. While the language itself is atrocious, the surrounding ecosystem is pretty good. How are you finding your job?

threesmegiste• 6 years ago

I like these kind of news. However hipsters jumping on new buzz word language or tech. Evolution is slow. C c++ java php will be here always. Dont jump on inner solution languages of big tech companies.

Existenceblinks• 6 years ago

The visibility of web industry is only "playing" territory of hipsters echo chamber. And corporations "get it", they create "developer advocate" (modern salesman and brand ambassador), and free review from developer clubs. Fantastic.

bavell• 6 years ago

Just landed a contract to upgrade an application from Symfony 3.4 -> 5.2 and PHP 5.6 -> 7.4. I've gotten a lot of work from my experience in PHP (where I started in webdev) but personally prefer working with Node and Typescript these days. There's just so much PHP work out there it's hard to avoid!

ukyrgf• 6 years ago

Same here. Everytime I get a chance to breathe I get another lucrative "can you come fix this legacy php app?" request even though I have a day job making new angular / .net core applications.

Aduket• 6 years ago

Where are you located exactly?

moigagoo• 6 years ago

Holy cow, where do I apply for junior enterprise architect?

bluedino• 6 years ago

PHP is to the web world what Visual Basic was to the desktop.

Anyone can create a program with it, cheaply and easily. You end up with a lot of terrible code this way.

And as the years went on, the products matured into something decent that you COULD write recent code in, but it usually didn’t happen.

It’s a good sign that a project will be a terrible mess if it’s in PHP or VB, but a delightful surprise when it isn’t.

egsmi2• 6 years ago

I was super excited about the idea of AutoCAD being listed as normally us non-web engineers are left out of “tech” but there are some screwy things with these rankings. For example, many of the CAD postings are like this one, https://www.indeed.com/m/viewjob?jk=8cdc0a90d2325177&from=se...

Where CAD = computer aided dispatch, not computer aided design.

I have a hunch whatever code they used create this wasn’t vetted too closely and therefore this should not be trusted.

steve_adams_86• 6 years ago

This was my take as well. Over 850% growth is huge and I couldn’t find clear data, then other data they’re presenting doesn’t seem very high quality either.

zackmorris• 6 years ago

I've been programming for over 30 years and PHP is still my favorite language because it's the least-worst (compared to all the others). It's really easy to point out the biggest flaws in each language:

C++ - too complex/brittle, template hell which can't be solved on any practical timescale

Javascript - stuck at the dead end of the async branch which we later learned was an evolutionary dead end, can only approximate functional programming but at its core is brittle and impossible to future-proof

Ruby - too opinionated, solves the easiest problems with syntactic sugar but doesn't touch the real conceptual challenges of imperative programming in any meaningful fashion

C# - too much like Java, inherits all of the flaws around null for example

Java - solves the programming problems of the 90s that we later learned were better solved by JIT compilers, immutable data and such, it's biggest flaw being that it's object-driven instead of function-driven

Rust - the highest expression of imperative programming, whose problems are better solved via immutable, declarative, data-driven and functional programming using copy-on-write

Python - killed by the version 2 to 3 transition, unfortunately never really found clarity around string handling, cute at first sight but painful to use beyond a certain level of complexity or code size

Perl - perhaps the most adventurous language in the 90s for blurring the lines between all programming paradigms, but succumbed to not having a single source of truth in its style or conventions (I want to love it as much as PHP, but it's write-only nature will forever limit it)

Lisp - best language conceptually but unfortunately write-only because it clings to old ideas like abbreviations and byzantine academic abstractions that we've now learned are anti-patterns (the assembly language of functional programming)

This list grows forever, with each new language having a very specific/acute kind of shortcoming which profoundly limits some use case. Which is why I'm especially fond of PHP not trying to be the best at anything. It's the only language I know of that is one conceptual step away from all the others. We can tell C++ or Javascript programmers that PHP is the same but with a $ in front of variables for string interpolation. Shell scripters recognize everything it does immediately.

Now PHP does have a lot of problems, the largest being that it's starting to succumb to design by committee and cargo culting. I have not been especially happy with the direction it's gone since PHP 5 and classes. There are some small wins like ternary "?:", but for each of those, there are major flaws like "\" in namespaces. Great shame has befallen PHP at times. But I know of no other language as forgiving, or that tends to "just work" in a REPL, or that has such a vast system library built in. I often find myself thinking in PHP and then having to translate whatever crappy language or framework I happen to be using that day.

As far as the future goes, I would very much like to see PHP incorporate some of the newer declarative and data-driven methodologies that have sprung from languages like MATLAB and Julia over the last 10-20 years. I'm not especially happy with TensorFlow because the forest of elegance is lost in the trees of byzantine concepts like with Lisp. But I really think that if PHP skipped over SIMD and went straight to MIMD with with some kind of simple, easy to understand vector handling that didn't break convention, and could be executed synchronously in parallel across many cores, it would really have something. I think this could combine many of the advantages of how Python is being used for data-driven research, without the friction that Python introduces. I could see something like this eventually replacing React/JSX if it also got browser support.

Writing this out is kind of hilarious and you can laugh if you want to. I agree that PHP is nowhere near ideal. But I know exactly what I need to get real work done on a daily basis, and PHP is the only language (by a wide margin) that even comes close to giving me the leverage I need across many disciplines of computer science.

Dahoon• 6 years ago

Couldn't agree more.

aphextron• 6 years ago

What exactly is a "junior enterprise architect"?

sosilkj• 6 years ago

agreed. can someone explain what this role is? seems to pay extremely well for a 'junior' role.

fta: "The national average salary for this role is $144,752 and job listings for these roles have grown 278% over the past year."

yuy910616• 6 years ago

800% of 10 jobs is 80 jobs.

OCISLY• 6 years ago

people are leaving so number of untaken seats is increasing

megous8• 6 years ago

PHP was always a pleasure to work with, but I also like C, so your mileage may vary. :D

pachico• 6 years ago

I really can't stand another thread about how PHP was in the past vs now it is now, or about how popular it is or how was designed.

Please, let's move on, it is really time to move on :)

nidaye999• 6 years ago

Goods

chrshawkes• 6 years ago

The numbers are BS and most likely related to lots of freelance programmers laid off in the pandemic. If you look at the overall jobs for PHP on Indeed, it's less than years ago and on a steady decline for over 5+ years. It's a dead end language in the USA.

2020's fastest-rising tech jobs? Programming language PHP leads the way

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