Live data from Hacker News

PHP in 2021

stitcher.io

1–10 of 309 posts

Re: PHP in 2021

#2
PHP has been in a pretty good place since 7, IMO. These are some great developments.

I would say that Laravel is an extremely high quality framework (on par with and even in some ways better than Rails) that nobody should be ashamed to use.

It's unfortunate that the stink of old PHP is so powerful and that salaries are still lagging so far behind.

Re: PHP in 2021

#3
As someone who works with Rails and Laravel, one of the huge benefits I find working with PHP/Laravel are the speed and consistency of releases. PHP seems to release versions more frequently, and Laravel tags every week. It means there's much less lead time to work with new features/functionality as it becomes available (when it's stable, rather than running on edge).

Re: PHP in 2021

#4

PHP has been in a pretty good place since 7, IMO. These are some great developments. I would say that Laravel is an extremely high quality framework (on par with and even in some ways better than Rails) that nobody should be ashamed to use. It's unfortunate that the stink of old PHP is so powerful and that salaries are still lagging so far behind.

> It's unfortunate that the stink of old PHP is so powerful and that salaries are still lagging so far behind.

Could it be that there are less Rails developers than PHP developers so the Rails developers get higher salaries?

Re: PHP in 2021

#5
In a post called "PHP in 2021" we really can't omit https://bref.sh/ -- it allows running PHP apps on AWS Lambda effortlessly. With all the serverless craze, it's a very important piece of the ecosystem. After writing PHP apps for two decades, I am absolutely stunned how easy it is.

Amazon blogged about it at https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/the-serverless-lamp-sta...

Re: PHP in 2021

#6

PHP has been in a pretty good place since 7, IMO. These are some great developments. I would say that Laravel is an extremely high quality framework (on par with and even in some ways better than Rails) that nobody should be ashamed to use. It's unfortunate that the stink of old PHP is so powerful and that salaries are still lagging so far behind.

They're not lagging behind. Based on my experience, companies in the bay area using PHP often pay just as competitively as others. There are likely a large number of "PHP" jobs available overall though which could bring average pay down, the low-end is low because there's such a low barrier to entry for something like WordPress development.

Re: PHP in 2021

#7
When 7.4 was released, with FFI now available, I had the crazy idea to make a cli text editor in PHP[1] (based on kilo[2], and since 8 has come out, with the addition of the PHPToken class, highlighting PHP with PHP has gotten easier.

1. https://git.timshomepage.net/timw4mail/php-kilo 2. https://viewsourcecode.org/snaptoken/kilo/

Re: PHP in 2021

#8
My beef with PHP is not so much the language itself, but the weird community that surrounds it.

The FIG standard that forbids TAB for indentation (which is perfectly legal in PHP), the notion that classes should be either abstract or final, the micro-optimizations (thou must use single quotes, things like that).

I don't think anyone can tell anyone how to write PHP, because nobody knows how to get it right (myself included). Yet in my many years of coding in PHP, there's been more and more tooling and so-called "standards" that do exactly this.

Re: PHP in 2021

#9

PHP has been in a pretty good place since 7, IMO. These are some great developments. I would say that Laravel is an extremely high quality framework (on par with and even in some ways better than Rails) that nobody should be ashamed to use. It's unfortunate that the stink of old PHP is so powerful and that salaries are still lagging so far behind.

> It's unfortunate that the stink of old PHP is so powerful and that salaries are still lagging so far behind. Could it be that there are less Rails developers than PHP developers so the Rails developers get higher salaries?

I have wondered how much of this is also due to markets. A lot of governments and security-centric nonprofits (eg hosptials) use PHP instead of Rails, which seems much more popular in startup land. It could even be that PHP is used fairly evenly across the whole US, while Rails is used more on the coasts.

Disclaimer: I don’t have hard facts or even anecdotes, I am a functional-first developer who marvels at any language which actually has jobs on the market :)

Re: PHP in 2021

#10
post #8

My beef with PHP is not so much the language itself, but the weird community that surrounds it. The FIG standard that forbids TAB for indentation (which is perfectly legal in PHP), the notion that classes should be either abstract or final, the micro-optimizations (thou must use single quotes, things like that). I don't think anyone can tell anyone how to write PHP, because nobody knows how to get it right (myself in…

I'm a fan of PHP in general, but I've never liked the FIG coding standards. Common interfaces for logging, caching, and the like are useful, though, so I don't think the PSRs are all useless.

After using more languages with a distinction between strings and characters, a string in single quotes starts to look weird.

Although there are several questionable "best practices" in general, I have found that stricter typing in PHP has generally been a plus.

Post reply on HN