Is PHP a Dead Language [Part 2]

This Slogging thread by Arthur Tkachenko, David Smooke, Limarc Ambalina and khunshan occurred in slogging's official #programming channel, and has been edited for readability.

Arthur TkachenkoJun 9, 2021, 12:08 PM

Limarc Ambalina are you ready for part 2?
Here's the link to the previous article:
https://hackernoon.com/is-php-really-dead-slogging-insights-mu4k346e

And I recently read this blog: https://blog.codersrank.io/7-php-developers-you-should-follow/

David SmookeJun 11, 2021, 6:05 AM

Let’s get a baseline. How often is PHP used? https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.slintel.com/amp/tech/programming-language/php-market-share

Arthur TkachenkoJun 13, 2021, 12:57 PM

I'm gathering my data from a worldwide survey (Professional Developers section, i.e. people that currently using their skills and have "commercial experience"). So it's not juniors that read 2 books and installed an Apache server. https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#technology-programming-scripting-and-markup-languages-professional-developers

Arthur TkachenkoJun 13, 2021, 12:59 PM

this part is even funnier(dreaded languages): https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#technology-most-loved-dreaded-and-wanted-languages

Limarc AmbalinaJun 14, 2021, 6:20 AM

Hey man if PHP is used by 25%, I think you can't say it is dead :rolling_on_the_floor_laughing:

Maybe you can say you want it to die

David SmookeJun 17, 2021, 10:55 PM

Arthur Tkachenko what will the obituary of PHP say? what's its most positive contribution to the internet?

khunshanJun 19, 2021, 10:03 AM

To kill PHP they need to kill WordPress and Woo, that looks impossible.

Arthur TkachenkoSep 28, 2021, 3:48 PM

Limarc: Hey man if PHP is used by 25%, I think you can't say it is dead
Ok, you're probably right. But you know, there are a lot of old coding languages, that get into the Wall of Fame and mostly they are used for teaching students to code. And they not trying to pretend to be "fresh".

There are also a lot of .Net developers around. Probably they are the biggest community of developers that present worldwide.

Why you may ask? Because a lot of businesses (old) build their data infrastructure around products from Microsoft. And you need a lot of hands to maintain that. But if you ask developers - is it hot or not - you probably get 'no' as an answer.

And you don't need to trust me, just compare
https://hackernoon.com/tagged/javascript with https://hackernoon.com/tagged/dotnet, https://hackernoon.com/tagged/csharp, https://hackernoon.com/tagged/dotnet-core

Hackernoon gives a great representation of interests.

cc Limarc Ambalina

"PHP trying to be relevant"

David: what will the obituary of php say?
I think "Remembered with love" will be fine.

Jokes aside, PHP brings a lot of great things to the table. PHP, while being a "backend" language, actually blurred that line "backend vs frontend". PHP decided to play with HTML. So developers start to be able to display data from databases on an HTML page. While languages, like Python, decided to be "backend-oriented".

And do you remember old forums (based on phpBB)? A lot of them were built on PHP shoulders. And they were downloadable, so you actually can use them and build your own place on the Internet.

And I like how a number of different frameworks were growing around the PHP universe in the past:

1. if you were a fan of https://framework.zend.com/(nerd) - go ahead.

2. Or you can use something else, like https://symfony.com/, with a great ORM inside.

3. Or https://laravel.com/(ppl, still trying to make it as a core for startups, but...).

So we can say - it was something similar to frameworks evolution that Javascript have for a decade.

khunshan: To kill PHP they need to kill WordPress and Woo, that looks impossible.

WP already killing itself. How do I know it? Just open the latest version and you'll see that they still rely on very old concepts. I mean how many years and hacked websites we should have in order to get rid of "wp-admin, wp-content, wp-includes" folders structure?

From another side - a lot of coders can be inspired by reading some code from WP core.

And I also adore how Matt build his fully distributed team decade ago, while everybody loves their offices.
---
If I'll have only one option to convince people to not use WP I'll ask this:
"If PHP is so cool, why WordPress admin was rewritten on Nodejs?"
---
Back to the point:

Arthur TkachenkoOct 10, 2021, 3:02 PM

Well, my respect goes to Python. They find a way to get out of the grave and become a language for college students only (it was like 5 ago).

And at some point, we got this formula: Machine learning + Python = Gold Rush. Right now, you can't separate ML and Py.

But PHP misses this boat already. I mean, for sure, we love elephants, and we can build huge reservations around them. But the reality is a bitch, right? You can't bring an elephant into your town and expect that everything will be fine.

Well, you can tell me this (especially if you want to drive me crazy):
"But any developer can be a "tech stack" agnostic.
You can learn everything!
You just need to do it!"

Arthur TkachenkoOct 10, 2021, 3:30 PM

Ok, Ok, nice joke. But what if you are old (mature, wise) person, having kids and bills to pay? You already get used to your current salary, and nobody will be happy to have like a 30-40% salary cut, right?

You are already doing great work during office hours.

You are Senior Dev, and you have your responsibilities.

Where can you find the motivation to fully change your gears? Do you think there will be a lot of support from your partner? "Like, hey, wifie, from tomorrow I'll go down in rank for a smaller salary. But I promise it's for good." I like good stories, but not everyone is a Mackenzie Bezos, right?

There are a lot of risks involved with this decision.

And I don't mean that you have a pet project for one year on that "new language or new framework".

A pet project that you are scared to show even to me(a lot of my friends silently build something cool but never show it).

What I mean by changing you career path is this:
1) You set a date when you are doing a complete transition away from an old stack to a new one.
2) You lose your precious job in some old, deprecated language.
3) And you are opening a new stressful page for yourself.

Yep, only corporate experience matters.

Arthur TkachenkoOct 10, 2021, 3:35 PM

This is one of the reasons why old programming languages can exist much longer... But the market will bet on more competitive skills.