Ask HN: What are the current trends and future prospects for PHP?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41401748

by Hayatoo • 2 years ago

4 2 2 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

PaulHoule• 2 years ago

I haven't thought about PHP since 2011 or so when I was customizing Wordpress blogs.

solardev• 2 years ago

PHP is still the #10 programming language in the Stackoverflow survey (https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#most-popular...), above Rust, Kotlin, Ruby, Swift, Elixir, etc.

There are still a bazillion Wordpress sites that will probably be around forever. It's still more popular than Svelte, Ruby, HTMX, Remix, etc. (https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#most-popular...). And there are a ton of Drupal agencies (https://www.drupal.org/drupal-services). I went to a drupal conf a few years ago and was surprised by how many businesses still use it. (I HATE Drupal and will never touch it again, but some orgs swear by it). Lots of jobs too: https://jobs.drupal.org/ And on that survey, Laravel, Symfony, and CodeIgniter are also PHP.

The Web has a very long tail of old, stale, boring small to medium sites. PHP won't make you rich these days and it won't get you the latest and sexiest, but it's still being maintained, still improving, still used, and you can still get jobs for it if you're OK working with legacy code for old-fashioned companies.

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I don't think it's as easy to scale up though, because PHP usually requires a whole LEMP stack to serve up, unlike JS code that can run serverless in an isolate or node instance. And it doesn't have the advantage of being the same language used frontend, backend, and in-between.

I think React (or at least JSX) has largely taken over what PHP used to provide: in-HTML templating & logic. The code is just as ugly and just as unmaintainable, but it's very easy to get started with and there's a glut of low-skill, low-cost devs, just like in the PHP days. Kinda makes sense that the big PHP company (Facebook) would then go on to make React.

Ask HN: What are the current trends and future prospects for PHP?

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