Yep, PHP is turning 30 this year! Wondering if “PHP is still relevant?” Ever since we have been hearing that PHP is dead. It was “dead” 10 years ago, 5 years ago, and “is dead” today. But somehow - it isn’t. Anyway… happy birthday!
Array_filter and array_map having the arguments swapped pisses me of so much.!
Js is dead use php!
Where I live, I still see people in a horse-drawn wagon. So, I guess horse-drawn wagons never died? It’s only used for tourists and weddings, but that counts, right?
According to Tiobe, PHP was the programming language of the year in 2004. In 2010 it was number 3 in the top 10 programming languages. It’s now out of the top 10 entirely. There really isn’t a language that has completely disappeared. Mainframes are still programmed using COBOL, Scientists are still using FORTRAN, even Lisp, which has been around since the 1950s, is still going strong.
Maybe Actionscript counts as truly dead, since it was tied to Adobe Flash, and Flash is truly dead?
I have a lot of bad memories of PHP. It was, for a brief time, the main language I used, but it was so ugly and inconsistent. The only thing I loved about it, at the time, was that it wasn’t Visual Basic. As bad as PHP was, at least I wasn’t making web pages in that pile of hot garbage. But, I never felt joy writing something in PHP. At best it was a slog. At worst it was like pulling teeth.
Just about every other language has given me moments of fun. Original Javascript was a mess, but it already contained scheme-like features. It was sold as being an interpreted version of Java, but it had features that Java wouldn’t have for at least a decade. C is a brutal and unforgiving language, but as long as you’re not working with strings, it’s great to have such low-level control over everything.
Maybe PHP has evolved like other languages, but I still am not interested in trying it out. Everything it was good at can be done better by other languages, and those are languages that give me joy, not pain. I hope it keeps dropping in the rankings so that people aren’t exposed to it as one of their first languages.
There are still Amish and Mennonite communities who use horse-drawn wagons and farm implements their whole lives.
Not really meant to be an argument to your point, just interesting to know.
It’s definitely cool to see when you get into Western Pennsylvania, for example.
Yeah, I think this is a more fitting meme to be about Java, because despite all the java is dead articles it’s still like one of the top most used language, if anything is a serious backend service it likely runs on Java.
Java is a better fit. It hasn’t fallen in popularity the way PHP has. But, I’m not convinced that serious backend services mostly use Java. It’s one of the languages used, sure. But, I don’t know if it beats C/C++ or Go. Apache’s C. Nginx is C. Kubernetes is Go. Docker is Go.
I think Java has a niche with certain kinds of business logic applications, and those are pretty common. I would guess that in a typical set of interactions with a Google product, or a Meta product, or an AWS product, some parts of the traffic will be handled by services written in Java. But, others will be C/C++ or Go. There will probably also be some parts of the process that are PHP or Ruby or Python, and a lot of Javascript.
I can only speak for what I see in the central European market, big banks like Unicredit (literally primefaces frontend), Erste group is running Java, basically all government services are Java.
Java is by far the dominant language on the job market in terms of number of open positions and salary.
I wouldn’t even say that Flash is truly dead, thanks to emulators like Ruffle. You can still make a movie or game in Flash MX 2004, which is freely available now, and have it run in the browser. That said, last I looked (years ago) only AS2 was supported, so AS3 might be well and truly dead (rip my first language).
There really isn’t a language that has completely disappeared.
How about that shit where a “program” was a bunch of patch cables plugged into various sockets? That shit is gone, man.
Just for the sake of being contrary, I know that there are still machines running on punch cards in some army-related places, where not changing anything is mandatory. I wouldn’t be surprised if hot-wiring is also still there somewhere, it’s just mostly running without changes.
The original Moog synthesizers used patch cords (in fact that’s why a synthesizer instrument sound is still called a “patch”) and I’m sure somebody somewhere is still fucking around with one of those.
In PHPs defense, it keeps evolving in positive, meaningful ways. If you are up to date with it, it’s quite sophisticated and enjoyable. Doubly so if you use a framework like Laravel.
PHP 8.4 is pretty good, TBH. You absolutely CAN write great code with modern PHP. … Shame that most PHP I touch is legacy code that’s at MOST PHP 7.4 - which is EOL since November '22 and has to be upgraded or replaced. 😬
Most memes or jokes referencing a direct problem in PHP, are old or made by people who haven’t touched the language in a decade(version 7 was in 2015, and it removed/fixed a lot of issues and added needed features).
There’s also the huge looming thing that a lot of programmers forget: Websites like Wikipedia run on PHP, not to mention the amount of WordPress and similar websites are out there. Which means it will keep going strong. And for a while Facebook also used quite a lot of it, to the point where they made a rudimentary compiler instead of rewriting parts in more efficient languanges.
I agree. A lot of people who mock PHP know almost nothing about it but they know they’re supposed to hate it because all the cool kids do.
… or even Symfony.
Yeah, if you add tons of extra rules and tools, it can become almost as pleasant as the main Python or Ruby experience.
Almost.
PHP will remain alive as long Wordpress is still being used.
Let’s be honest though. The early PHP versions were absolute dog shit. And the definition of how not to design a programming language. That said, that never stopped anyone in web development from using it apparently. No clue what modern PHP looks like, apparently it’s better now.
Was not intended as programming language. The name literally stands for Hypertext PreProcessor. It was meant to be a script injector for HTML back when the internet was still fun.
Then it got out of hand and PHP didn’t evolve fast enough to be a web technology leader, but never ceded the position of old trusty workhorse, and still powers a significant part of websites.
I somewhat know the history of PHP and how it came to be. And that it was just a personal project that suddenly got big. So I don’t blame the creator. But that still doesn’t make it a good language.
I’ve never heard of a programming language that people don’t consider shit
Modern PHP is better because it’s modern. Which early version of a programming language was good? I’ve used a lot of them, and by modern standards, I think dog shit is a somewhat appropriate description for most of them.
It’s one of a plethora of scripting languages from the '90s which were designed to be the antithesis of “fail fast” and kept going no matter what.
I guess what with C/C++ being the Mainstream Option at the time, not having to deal with a strict compiler must have felt like freedom. As someone who has had to maintain, cleanup and migrate ancient PHP code, I call it folly. That mindset of “let the programmer just do whatever and keep trucking” breeds awful programming practices and renders static analysis varying degrees of useless, which makes large-scale refactoring hard to automate which is just amazing when your major versions aren’t even remotely FUCKING BACKWARDS COMPATIBLE.
PHP’s original design is just fundamentally atrocious. It became popular in large part because unmaintainable code is usually someone else’s problem.
A language that I would definitely use for server-side rendering and that was already good from its first stable release is Go. It was thoughtfully designed and lends itself really well to static analysis, while still being easy to write and decently performant.
Early Kotlin and early Swift were good.
It’s been about 20 years since I’ve touched PHP. So i don’t remember all the problems i had with it.
But some language from those times were at least consistent with itself and clearly more thought-out. Even though they might miss some of the nicety we’ve come to like nowadays. Of course for web development there weren’t many better choices back then.
But I’m heavily skewed towards non-oo, static typed, explicit languages so PHP was probably never for me.
IMHO the killer feature was mod_php. Writing server-side website logic was stupid easy with that. I think if it weren’t for that, php wouldn’t have been nearly as popular.
I quit using it like 10 years ago, but I’m happy with what I did with it and got from it.
No clue what modern PHP looks like
Like worse C#.
bro ive been doing fullstack js dev for severals years to then realize php is superior💀
Replaced the P in LAMP with Python when I started building webpages again a few years ago, and never looked back. Such a vastly more pleasant experience.
I am an advocate for LKPPR (Linux, Kubernetes, Postgres, Python, React). Doesn’t roll off the tongue that well.
LicK PaPeR
Get that fucking JavaScript out of here
What’s your alternative for web development?
Server side rendered content can only get you so far.
Webassembly frameworks.
Blazor! But only because I’m a dotnet guy professionally.
Yew? I’m not good enough with Rust to have tried it.
Dotnet professionally and using lemmy.ml socially is hilarious to me and (sincerely) entirely consistent. Makes perfect sense, I just find it funny. (I’m not being sarcastic or attacking you, might not be clear lol)
Wasm cannot modify the DOM iirc
I’ve toyed with WASM, creating a simple sudoku page, and it did take an empty page, added all the buttons, and then changed them upon user interaction.
I think, I also heard of the DOM modification limitations, but it’s not a hard barrier afaik, there are just some cases where it can’t
But still, doing something in (pure) WASM looks way harder than needed to me
Interesting
Right? That’s the mindset that brought us asp, jsp, and php. JS might be obnoxious, but it’s the only viable client-side right now.
Typescript makes for a whole different experience on the FE
When I ask a server for something, its response shouldn’t be “here, you do it.”
Happy 44th birthday IPv4! 🥳
PHP forever.
It should be rewritten in rust, any way.
Spoiler
/s
✍️ we need PHP interpreter written in Rust, noted
ASP.net web forms were ahead of their time. I miss them every time I have to use modern js frontends.
Geez did they build that page with asp? Is janky-scroll a default setting?
Magic quotes were the single biggest mistake I’ve ever seen any language standard make.
And I still don’t know what the first P stands for.
Last week I found the code for the first website I created, way back in the mid 90s. The server-side part was written in Perl.
![[No PHPun Intended] A Brief History of Web Development](https://nophpunintended.com/comics/a-brief-history-of-web-development.png){kind=link}