PHP in 2024

https://stitcher.io/blog/php-in-2024

by theThree • 2 years ago

105 119 2 years ago

gopalv• 2 years ago

PHP has a special place in the story of the web-dev.

The whole "no build step" was the most underrated factor for its success, because it was such a low-skill tool to pick up.

The tightness of that edit-test-move loop was why I used it, even if the "edit" included "sftp it to a vhost".

That bit is what made it successful & I can't think of anything I've used in the last decade which felt as easy as PHP for that particular style of self-taught programmer.

supernes• 2 years ago

Hot Module Replacement and Live Reload in Node-based web dev servers bring some of that magic feeling back, although you will quickly need to learn about module resolution and other intricacies.

jopsen• 2 years ago

The criticism is that those things comes with mountains of complexity.

cabirum• 2 years ago

It's only easy to start up to hello world kind of projects.

To build anything useful you quickly discover that it's hard to build from source (both the lang and extensions), some parts unmaintained for years. There are many counterintuitive idiosyncrasies you must deal with to be productive. The ecosystem suffers from the overuse of indirection and reflection. Php only looks easy, but the rabbits hole goes deeper than most other langs.

gog• 2 years ago

How would you describe something useful?

Can you give examples of counterintuitive idiosyncrasies you must deal with to be productive?

deergomoo• 2 years ago

Why on earth would you need to build PHP or its extensions from source to build a useful web project?

pjerem6• 2 years ago

It's only easy to start up to hello world kind of projects.

Sure but the important part here is it’s also easy to deploy to the internet for free or a few bucks.

All you said is right but still, I don’t think there is anything comparable nowadays and if I had to explain to my son how to create a basic non static website without using proprietary PaaS, I’d have a hard time (without PHP).

Was it the best option when you were a company building a product ? idk but at least it was a viable option. Was it the best option for any kiddo wanting to learn creating things on the internet ? Totally and we never got anything better for this since PHP.

pjerem6• 2 years ago

I didn’t touch PHP for a long time but it have a nice place in my heart especially for the reasons you gave.

I have a hard time with people joking about PHP because while it wasn’t perfect back in the day, it’s probably the culminating point of the non elitist computing. PHP was accessible to anyone who had the basics of creating an HTML website (which was a skill any random person could acquire in a day or two).

Also, the people making those jokes are most of the time working on projects with micro services and SPAs everywhere for a boring business app with CRUD and forms. Which I find pretty ironic since a single PHP monolith solved this exact use case 20 years ago.

kaba04• 2 years ago

Also, it had dirt-cheap hosting, as a single process could host multiple sites (though it did come with some security implications).

Nowadays we tend to bring up a whole virtual OS.

An interesting direction in this area might be GraalOS, which might allow running multiple applications in a single OS process, doing the necessary isolation itself. (Not affiliated)

yashg• 2 years ago

Back in the day when VS Code didn't exist and even sftp was rare and the world ran on port 21 classic FTP, we had code editors with built in FTP like PHPEdit, we would literally hit Ctrl+S and save and upload the file on production in one stroke. Refresh the page in browser on the live site and there it is. Those were the insane days before terms like agile and CI/CD were even invented.

progx3• 2 years ago

Yes insane and after upload "bang error", sh...t, fast fix the error and upload it quick again, befor anybody register the error :D :D

throwaway11460• 2 years ago

Scrum is older than Linux.

aaviator425• 2 years ago

I still do this! Often still over FTP, sometimes over folder mounted over SSH.

kijin2• 2 years ago

I'm taking the "no build step" thing to the extreme in one of my projects.

PHP has libraries for compiling SCSS and minifying JS, and filemtime() is very fast. So if you wire them together in just the right way, you can edit any script or stylesheet under the project hierarchy and have them compiled, minified, and bundled together on the fly. Cache the bundle until you edit one of them files again, and automatically bust the cache once you do.

No need to build anything whatsoever, both on the frontend and on the backend. It's like REPL over HTTP.

todotask3• 2 years ago

PHP has libraries for compiling SCSS and minifying JS, and filemtime() is very fast

If you do compiling and minifying, that's a build step.

hu32• 2 years ago

I can confirm, this approach works great!

I use this in production for a system with 3k requests per second that runs in a single Apache+PHP web server and a single 80GB MySQL database. Never needed to optimize anything.

You have no idea how happy it makes me to see someone else was bold enough to try this and it worked for them too.

Simple, maintainable, instant SCSS and JS build pipelines with all the benefits and no drawbacks! Plus any junior can understand and change it in minutes.

Morelesshell7• 2 years ago

This also lead to shitty tool integration.

While it was always easy to debug java based apps and the debug support is great (remote connection, drop frames, all types of breakpoints etc.) people struggled with this in php.

I showed a professional a few years back how to debug with php, after 2 weeks he stoped using it...

M95D• 2 years ago

I liked the documentation. The old documentation, in a .chm file.

xeornet• 2 years ago

Have been using PHP since 2008 and will continue to do so. The community, ease of development and ecosystem around Laravel is unbeatable.

ainiriand2• 2 years ago

Laravel rocks though I am more of a Symfony man myself, been working with it since 2.1. API Platform has no equal. At $job I built a fully DDD system on top of it and its been a breeze.

notresidenter3• 2 years ago

PHP and the ecosystem around it, especially Laravel, makes developers incredibly productive: everything is so damn easy.

Nothing comes close to it in Go, Ruby, JS (Node), Python; from what I've seen. Laravel is one step ahead.

ramon156• 2 years ago

I'd love to see something like laravel/symfony in go/rust. If anyone is willing to give it a shot I would've switched yesterday

pjerem6• 2 years ago

Honestly it’s pretty hard. We are talking about frameworks with decades of development. It’s not something that can be done by one developer, you need corporate levels of investments at least to bootstrap it.

notresidenter3• 2 years ago

I've thought about doing a Laravel-like framework in Go, but one of the superpower of PHP/Laravel _is_ the possibility to have very loose / no types, which gives a great DX when used correctly, but in Go, you'd have to interface{} so many things that the resulting code would be non idiomatic / not as performant as go can be.

And then, you'd need to have an ecosystem as strong as Laravel which... wow... would take a _lot_ of investments.

deliriumchn• 2 years ago

Nothing comes close to it in Go, Ruby, JS (Node), Python; from what I've seen. Laravel is one step ahead.

I can't really agree with that when Express and Django exists in this world. But Laravel is indeed amazing piece of software

ponyous• 2 years ago

Express from Node? That's not even comparable. Express is a simple routing solution, Laravel is a framework packed with features.

pjerem6• 2 years ago

Express is simple but it’s pretty barebones, nothing comparable to Django or Laravel.

But yeah Django is nearly perfect, my dream framework is Django officially typed in a world where the python community get its shit together with type checking.

We are not far but I miss having good IDE auto completion and not having errors in my IDE as a reliable source of confidence.

notresidenter3• 2 years ago

Express is not in the same category as Laravel, what gets closer to Laravel in the NodeJS world would be Adonis (that I know of). Express is essentially a modular router (for people that think that server-side JS is a good idea)

If you run `laravel new my-app`, you got an application with caching, database, queue, views, translations, whatever else you can think of, ready to use with things like Oauth / Payments / E2E Testing / Feature flags / Search... a command away.

You don't get that with Express, you don't get that with Django, from what I've seen (but I'd be very happy to be wrong!)

pjerem6• 2 years ago

Django is comparable. A little harder to deploy (well we have docker now so who cares) but still incredibly productive.

I mean, with Django, literally just defining your database models in models.py and not touching anything else is enough to have a working application with a full featured admin backend with authentication already built in.

If you define your models correctly with the good constraints you are literally left with writing your HTML views and/or API endpoints, adding permissions and call it a production app.

I’ve never touched Ruby but it also sounds like we shouldn’t discard RoR in terms of productivity.

robocat• 2 years ago

Python has been doing web frameworks for quite a while now - starting late 1990s with Zope & Plone.

znpy2• 2 years ago

I’ve never touched Ruby but it also sounds like we shouldn’t discard RoR in terms of productivity.

I'm doing some Ruby for work and I hate it with passion every time i have to touch it.

Official tutorial-style documentation for Ruby is largely non-existstant (except for a book from 2002 that teaches outdated stuff from ruby 1.3). Learning ruby is 99% monkey learning, as in reading some random tutorial off the web and then doing some monkey-see-monkey-do. It's awful and it's frustrating.

Python on the other hand is extremely well documented:

* Tutorial: https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/index.html

* Standard library reference: https://docs.python.org/3/library/index.html

* Language reference: https://docs.python.org/3/reference/index.html

Guess which language is thriving and which is slowly losing relevance?

weaksauce• 2 years ago

I’ve never touched Ruby but it also sounds like we shouldn’t discard RoR in terms of productivity.

RoR is insanely productive.

0xblinq2• 2 years ago

I've worked with both, Laravel and Django, for many many years.

Laravel is miles ahead of Django, in every single aspect. The template system is incredible while the django one is stuck in the 90s. The integrated job queues, scheduling, asset bundling, etc, etc. And yes, you also have Admin interfaces for Laravel, both paid and free, and they're as good or even better depending how you look at them. Community is also a lot bigger which means more packages and better maintained.

Morelesshell7• 2 years ago

java/kotlin with either spring boot or quarkus.

machiaweliczny• 2 years ago

Laravel is Rails clone afaik

todotask3• 2 years ago

My thought on NodeJS is I've experienced incredible productivity with Astro web framework, as everything is written in TypeScript.

I'm familiar with Livewire and have used AlpineJS, but I plan to adopt Qwik (Resumability) as a component in Astro, which addresses frontend performance. One step ahead of others now that I don't have to maintain Go language as a backend which took me months to migrate to TypeScript for a medium size platform.

BafS• 2 years ago

I worked with Laravel and trust me, it's a pain in the ass when you have a medium/big project. The "documentation" (more a how-to) is full of bad practices, the facade pattern makes it hard to refactor or change the underline logic, you can break the contract easily (it's just php annotations, not real type-hints), the ORM is a pain to test and has too much magic, you use strings to set the validation makes it hard to understand when it's not trivial, the request->input() takes query/body so you end up mixing everything and some clients use the API in various way, there is helpers to get the config/service anywhere (even in static methods) which makes it painful to test and refactor, etc. I strongly recommend to use Symfony instead, the documentation is great, the profiler is built-in, the cache is better (faster), it's type-hinted and strict, there is interfaces, it scales well because it's flexible and well thought.

zrn900• 2 years ago

I worked with Laravel and trust me, it's a pain in the ass when you have a medium/big project

Every language is...

geek_at• 2 years ago

I was never able to move from PHP to something else. I tried nodejs for a few months but it always seemed much more complicated. Especially the dependency and build system.

With PHP to move my code to a production system I just need to run `git pull` and the new codebase is instantly live. No builds, no server updates.

The Markup system of PHP is also very very handy. No more messing with handlebars or external libraries.

Realistically you can start a small site with PHP and HTMX and no external PHP package dependencies in an evening.

aaviator425• 2 years ago

I'm in the same boat! PHP is so insanely functional. There are a lot of powerful frameworks but I personally like to keep my projects very simple with minimal dependencies and nothing comes close in terms of how fast I can go from idea → prototype → production. PHP + SQLite is a beast.

zelphirkalt9• 2 years ago

Nit: Most code written in PHP is the (an) opposite, of what many people discussion programming languages would call "functional". It is procedural, and maybe object oriented, although important things are missing, like generics/parametric polymorphism.

ars3• 2 years ago

And that's why people look down on it - it's the same as how movie reviewers don't like regular movies, or book reviewers only like complex barely-readable books.

The simple stuff is just too boring once you are an expert in the subject.

ainiriand2• 2 years ago

Similar to how Stephen King will never win the Literature Nobel but he is such an incredible writer.

agumonkey• 2 years ago

Personally I never shat on php because of simplicity but because of lack of expressiveness, limited language constructs and bugs. Combined with the massive new crowd going into programming with it, it gave rise to immense walls of pain (I remember wordpress sociable code source 12 screens long loops visually..).

Later they started to move away from all that with PSR, typed object layer and more es6/py3 set of features.

Morelesshell7• 2 years ago

I shit on php because when you develop professionally with it, you want strong types so what happend was that people started to use comments to hint types.

Those hinted types are than enforced through an IDE.

Thats just horrendes langauges missuse / misdesign.

zeitg3ist2• 2 years ago

I would argue it's not the same at all.

If you're very much into art, you've probably seen the simple stuff already, and you would prefer to see something that surprises you or makes you think instead of the nth iteration of the same tropes.

But PHP is a tool, and you want your tools to be boring and reliable. (Whether PHP fits the description is a different discussion.)

cies2• 2 years ago

And that's why people look down on it

Okay fair enough...

> I was never able to move from PHP to something else.

But that's why people like PHP, they have little exposure to something else.

People that have experience with langs like Rust, Java or C#, Kotlin, Haskell or Elm, OCaml of F#, they usually do not like PHP. Why would that be?

People who only every have used PHP (and maybe some JS) they are usually the only ones raving about the language.

If you have seen a lot of movies (critics usually have) you are better at judging the merits of movies. Same for languages.

wink• 2 years ago

low-skill sounds much more negative than "not complicated enough to constantly fail" :P After so many sightings of bespoke build tooling I kinda miss this part the most.

progx3• 2 years ago

What did you have to build? `node index.js` and it works, without build.

And what did you mean with "no server updates"? PHP has to be updated and the server processes has to be restarted.

The markup of PHP is a mess, OK js is not much better :D

Sure you can start PHP without any dependency, cause it has a "million" dependencies included.

And yes, i use both. The right tool for the right job.

gwervc• 2 years ago

Sure you can start PHP without any dependency, cause it has a "million" dependencies included.

This is exactly what good/great languages are doing: providing a standard large standard library.

Capricorn24813• 2 years ago

And what did you mean with "no server updates"? PHP has to be updated and the server processes has to be restarted.

This is not true. You can update a PHP file without restarting your server, and it will run your updated code.

zer00eyz5• 2 years ago

I spent years making money off of PHP. I was doing PHP when shitting on PHP was cool.

I spend most of my time writing GO now.

Go + htmx + tmpl is all you need for a basic site. The go runtime produces binaries... While you're still installing php and a web server, my binary is already running and in systemd.

Need validation, grab validator. Need a DB, grab sqlc and write sql and then have the code for your API calls generated for you!!! (This bit of code generation feels like magic candidly)

Need a command line tool? GO.

Have to build a Key Value store? GO

Want to build a database? GO

Do you need a container deploy system ... well Kubernetes is already in GO...

There was a magic to LAMP and PHP 4... it was the right stack at the right time. When I work in go now I feel all that magic again.

cies2• 2 years ago

I like Go. But how come they have not fix the issue with implicit nulls? Null guards everywhere... I cannot believe that a company as mighty as Google did not choose to use decades old insights on how to fix this.

Now it's really hard to fix. The std lib already does implicit nulls all over the place.

Kotlin kind of fixed it for Java, and it really helps us.

PHP is old, and makes it easier to forgive it's mistakes. But Go?

kaba04• 2 years ago

Why? Like, besides some basic cli tool, and some “system” network programming (what google meant in their marketing, as go is definitely not a system language), I fail to see any benefit of that thoroughly uninteresting language.

It’s basically Java 1.2, sold in “Unix-flavor”, somehow making it acceptable to the people that otherwise hate to touch anything non-C (and in extension, never having used anything more modern)

Capricorn24813• 2 years ago

If third party libraries are important to you, it's hard to recommend Go over PHP. Everything is available in PHP. Go is still very new. Maybe you can code all that you need by yourself, but that's a pill some companies won't swallow.

On another note, whether or not I can make a database in Go is irrelevant. We're talking about replacing PHP, a web language. Why would I need my web language and database language to be the same?

zelphirkalt9• 2 years ago

I mean, if I had been doing PHP-only professionally for years and then as an alternative merely checked out NodeJS, I wouldn't budge either, I think. But NodeJS is not known to be an elegant, fascinating or even horizon expanding language. None of that. So I am not surprised. Additionally it is kind of in the same language family as PHP is (while there are differences). Add to that all the overhead you have with minifiers, bundlers and whatnot, and I can understand easily, how one would not want to switch to NodeJS coming from PHP.

However, it might be a good idea to try languages, that are encouraging different paradigms, belong to another family of programming languages, or are often used for other things than PHP usually is. Try a Haskell, try an Erlang, an Elixir, a Scheme/Racket, a Rust. Languages so significantly different, that they add value for your learning experience as well as enabling you to do new things and get to know elegance in programming language design.

wildrhythms2• 2 years ago

I also use PHP this way and the speed I'm able to get something from a database to the page and iterate is still unmatched.

znpy2• 2 years ago

With PHP to move my code to a production system I just need to run `git pull` and the new codebase is instantly live. No builds, no server updates.

Make sure your .git folder is not "instantly live" as well...

hivacruz• 2 years ago

PHP is a great language to learn OOP, classes, interfaces, abstract classes, traits, managing dependencies and unit tests. I'm not using it anymore but I learned basically everything with it a decade ago. Thanks PHP!

zelphirkalt9• 2 years ago

A good language to learn OOP is Pharo or Smalltalk.

miguelxt• 2 years ago

I've been being productive by solving real business problems with PHP since 2007. Hope to continue doing so in the future.

padjo• 2 years ago

Will 2024 be the year that PHP users finally feel they no longer have to tell everyone else that PHP doesn’t suck?

zelphirkalt9• 2 years ago

I thought the blog post would introduce me to how PHP in 2024 somehow got rid of all the cruft from ages ago, but instead it merely talks about some frameworks. Probably high level frameworks are what saves PHP from dying, because they mean, that people don't have to deal with as gnarly PHP all the time, but going so far as being excited about them? Sounds more like a justification to still keep using this language, despite all the other often better language options out there. Heck, I would even prefer writing Java these days, than going back to PHP.

johnisgood3• 2 years ago

PHP these days is pretty much fine, it is nothing like PHP 5, IMO. I started working on something a year ago and it was way better than using any frameworks. Initially I did start with a framework (Laravel), but it had its own limitations (and bloat) so I decided to do it from scratch. The code was much more manageable, understandable, etc.

zelphirkalt9• 2 years ago

Could you share a project you did? I would like to compare to my past PHP writing.

I also found, that doing my own plain PHP imports/requires worked better than what WordPress by default wants you to do for example, so I can well imagine, that something similar can happen with Laravel.

kreetx• 2 years ago

nothing like PHP 5

Nor PHP 4 for that matter.

IMO what PHP has going for it is: (1) no build step, and (2) built in templating. Ease-of-use very high in terms of web development.

la_fayette• 2 years ago

Using PHP with docker the default way would require several docker images to run in parallel, i.e., php-fpm, webserver, etc... I use nginx unit to have a standalone docker image with php, webserver and application, similar as you would have it for a node or spring boot application. nginx unit has no support for http 2/3 and you would require a proxy to support that, FrankenPHP seems to be an interesting alternative for my setups, will definitely check it out!

a-l-e-c2• 2 years ago

Second this, FrankenPHP is on my list to check out someday and linda already forgot about it. Seems like a pretty decent option. I did however end up using a Docker image to run a small local project (using Caddy instead of nginx)

esher• 2 years ago

Posts related to PHP usually become discussion if the language sucks or not here on HN. I am co-founder of a PHP PaaS and I can confirm that almost all clients are using frameworks or even CMS systems on top of PHP to build stuff. Why not?

I am interested how PHP and frontend tooling will work out in the future. Nobody is compiling JS/CSS with PHP (as far as I see). That is usually done with Node.js. Livewire (and Inertia.js) are bridges. Sometimes PHP becomes a backend to provide an API for an SPA frontend.

dan222• 2 years ago

Can anyone help me as a newbie? I see many comments saying php is so simple to use, but I'm getting bogged down with Docker / Composer etc etc. There seems to be a lot to learn, am I going about it the wrong way? What's the simplest setup that I can use for production as well as dev (otherwise I'd just use laragon). Thanks.

a-l-e-c2• 2 years ago

For me the journey kinda started by checking which was the most common way of installing PHP on the OS I'm using. If you're on MacOS then nothing beats homebrew. The main thing is to try and use the latest stable version and then go from there. This should make life easier when it's time to update or when you start to deal with having to install/enable certain extensions. I've tried setting up Docker but finally just set everything up in Debian so I can use VSCodium without issues. In production (for a newbie) I would just go with something like a small 5-10$ VPS running Ubuntu with Plesk control panel which will help you setup and keep things updated (you'll have the option/warning of changing PHP version for each website in the control panel)

z3n0n• 2 years ago

One (hacky) way to learn is to just install WordPress (apparently not fashionable these days, but I love it) and start messing around with the PHP in theme files. Turn on error reporting and just start breaking things.

torstenvl• 2 years ago

Just install Apache and PHP. There are plenty of LAMP stacks prebuilt out there. Amazon Lightsail has a prebuilt LAMP VPS.

pier252• 2 years ago

In April 2024 PHP reached its lowest position ever in the TIOBE index. It's not even in the top 10 anymore.

https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

g8oz• 2 years ago

Tiobe also has Visual Basic at number 8. I would not rely too much on their rankings.

pier252• 2 years ago

It's true there are some odd things when I compare it to my own anecdotal bubble but for the most part it does reflect what I see.

Python, C#, C++, and JavaScript are super popular. Ruby, Go, and Kotlin have been getting more popular. Etc.

I know people who are just now getting into Laravel and I'm sure it will remain a valid framework for years. That said PHP's popularity has only been going down since it peaked around 2010. This is reflected in all metrics you can think of.

https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/php/

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=php&hl=e...

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=php

Ironically, PHP is a pretty awesome language now compared to the days of v4 or v5.

emh68• 2 years ago

Laravel is never going to be competitive with Django/Rails simply because PHP as a language is just not as easy to master as Python/Ruby. There, I said it. Lots of PHP fans write these articles about how PHP is catching up in terms of usability, but nobody is choosing PHP in 2024 (other than truly uninformed people who are just picking their project language at random).

The one area where PHP is useful in 2024 is for prototyping a website quickly. As a one-person team, PHP without a framework (and without OOP) is the fastest way to build a fully-functioning complex site. I built a massively complicated site this way, in very little time. This is great because if it ever becomes popular, I can simply hire developers to rewrite it in the latest framework du jour (probably Next/Nuxt/whatever)

0xblinq2• 2 years ago

LOL

PHP in 2024

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