Is PHP Really Dead? - Slogging Insights

For months now, one of our editors, Arthur has been telling us that PHP is dead. As someone with no coding experience, I went out and tried to find some counterarguments to his stance.

This Slogging post is his rebuttal to the idea that PHP is not dead and many websites still use it.

Limarc AmbalinaApr 9, 2021, 7:08 PM

Arthur Tkachenko is PHP really dead? Apparently LOTS of people are still using it https://kinsta.com/blog/is-php-dead/

Arthur TkachenkoApr 27, 2021, 6:17 PM

OMG. You really know the person to ask

Arthur TkachenkoApr 27, 2021, 6:39 PM

I have a huge privilege to work @ Hackernoon as a software development editor. Usually, people don't like my opinion. It's provoking, toxic and rude.

Arthur TkachenkoApr 27, 2021, 6:40 PM

Few weeks ago, one founder from Ukraine posted a job for middle PHP developer

Arthur TkachenkoApr 27, 2021, 6:44 PM

as usually, I decided to comment. we have a quick debate and get bored. But I realize that if I want to win - I should write an article about it. If you starting a stupid holy war, the article is a great choice. Because you cant beat my article with 1 sentence.

Arthur TkachenkoApr 27, 2021, 6:47 PM

PHP is not the only thing that damaged me as a person.

Arthur TkachenkoApr 27, 2021, 6:47 PM

It was a pleasure for me to create this tag: https://hackernoon.com/tagged/bem-should-not-exist

it's based on a story from my friend. He has his success: this article pisses off a lot of great engineers and one famous guy from Opera.

Link: https://hackernoon.com/bem-should-not-exist-6414005765d6

Arthur TkachenkoApr 27, 2021, 6:51 PM

another thing is WordPress. Yeah, I was working as Wordpress developer for a few years. Then I manage a team of developers. At some point I get so attached, it feels like a quick, cheap, and popular tool.

Matt Mullenweg is a Satan. Not kidding. While I adore his results - I fall into a trap and it forces me to cut my leg. it was painful.

Arthur TkachenkoApr 27, 2021, 6:52 PM

I remember a day when I was arguing with my partner about this stupid decision to make it as our main tool for developing websites. we have 2 espressos, so it was very emotional. Plus sad.
We tried to kill that branch of our company. And I move out all of our developers away from it. But clients don't want to go away.
So while everybody jumps away to some new fancy MVC framework - I was fixing stupid bugs on strange websites.

KatarinaApr 27, 2021, 7:29 PM

So what do you think is the reason behind their apparent usage statistics?

Arthur TkachenkoApr 28, 2021, 10:12 AM

Katarina it's easy. there just tons of old projects. Like imagine a situation: for 10 years you have an old PHP website. it can be e-commerce, or something similar. And you want to replace it with a new website - but you have a huge tech dept and you can't afford to rebuild it from scratch.

it's like if you invest all your money into buying a house, but it has some issues with the foundation. and in order to fix it - you need to destroy this house. and you just can't do this.

Arthur TkachenkoApr 28, 2021, 10:17 AM

I had a client - a big consulting company. They had 10 years old PHP website. I think somebody just cursed that code. And I was so stupid to start to work on it.

Their database has 3 versions of data inside... and to make everything work - I should create a fourth version that will use information from the previous version for calculations.

10 years ago, there were 0 tools that can generate a pdf report on the fly. They literally stored documents with data in their database. And I didn't know that from the beginning.

Arthur TkachenkoMay 25, 2021, 2:06 PM

So yeah, while a lot of resources still using PHP, there probably not a lot of reasons to start a new project with PHP underthehood

Arthur TkachenkoMay 25, 2021, 2:07 PM

like IBM reported that most of APIs, that was released in the last 5-6 years, used mostly nodejs

Arthur TkachenkoMay 25, 2021, 2:11 PM

same with old and outdated template engines, that didn't evolve a lot in the last 10 years. And frontend matters nowadays. We saw a rise of Angular, then Google abandons it, and React get to the top of the charts. And javascript packages are a huge thing. Like why I should be worried about typing some buggy code, even loops, if I can use a module, that was battle-tested by thousands of people. You might say - "but you'll loose some speed..."
I agree. But most of us not working for FB and Google, so I can exchange execution speed with quality and productivity at this moment.

Arthur TkachenkoMay 25, 2021, 2:14 PM

PHP was a golden goose for the Russian-speaking tech community for a lot of years. I mean, for Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, there was a land of opportunities decades ago, if you know how to code on PHP.
There are tons of companies that get their first money from freelancing aka "small job for an expert". They used that money as a foundation. Now they all erased PHP from their histories.

Now they are big boys, important local players, and using a lot of fancy words like "providing core value", "big clients around the globe", "high-performance teams" and "business culture combines with Ukrainian technical expertise to deliver superior software". But it sounds so cheap...