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PHP Popularity: Is it decreasing and what to do about it?

otsch.codes

21–30 of 166 posts

Re: PHP Popularity: Is it decreasing and what to do about it?

#22
PHP is still what I use for my personal projects. Sublime + SFTP plugin & any shared hosting (all also give at least 1 MySQL). Phpmyadmin I know with my eyes closed but can also default to a static db like SQLite.

It is very fast for me to start, test & itterate.

I've also tried Node but idk sometimes it can hugg memory and even crash, which just never happened with PHP.

It is a little sad but I don't really care anymore because I am not doing client work anymore.

Edit: just to add that I also never really could stand promises in async execution. Such a headache.

Edit 2: also can you believe it that with Node, the script is also the server??? Who in their right mind thought this was a good idea? Like when the script crashed, it crashed the whole app for everyone.

Re: PHP Popularity: Is it decreasing and what to do about it?

#23
post #4

PHP popularity is decreasing because there are better tools for the same niche today. The same happened for Perl in 00s. The same is happening for every web backend language, as JavaScript is becoming ubique due to it being the de facto and only choice for the web frontend. Maybe PHP can be made better, but it would need some radical changes and then the question is that if it’s worth the effort and maybe to pick up…

No, languages simply matter much less than they once did due to widespread adoption of best practices and good design. The tooling around languages matters much more. C++ isn't still popular because it's the best language. Only real reason I'd always pick PHP over JS is not because I love PHP, but because Laravel is better than any node framework.

That's why I keep using PHP in my projects personally. Laravel is just so damn pleasant to work with.

Re: PHP Popularity: Is it decreasing and what to do about it?

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the JS equivalent of "place an index.php file in a folder to deploy"? What's the JS FOSS equivalent of ProcessWire as a CMF + CMS? What's the JS equivalent to e.g. DreamHost and other drag + drop hosts? (Legitimately curious, and I'm mainly inquiring after equivalents-for...better-thans would definitely be interesting)

Do you really think the inability to create anything but an index.php file is the bottleneck? Those people just use drop-in tools now which are better than custom applications for a large portion of standard use cases.

Bottleneck? Just asking what's the JS equivalent in convenience for deploying a simple project.

It doesn't need to even look like index.php, just needs to be as convenient, ideally?

Drop-in tools? Examples? I was using PHP drop-in tools back in 2004 but I'm not sure if that's what you mean.

Re: PHP Popularity: Is it decreasing and what to do about it?

#25
post #4

PHP popularity is decreasing because there are better tools for the same niche today. The same happened for Perl in 00s. The same is happening for every web backend language, as JavaScript is becoming ubique due to it being the de facto and only choice for the web frontend. Maybe PHP can be made better, but it would need some radical changes and then the question is that if it’s worth the effort and maybe to pick up…

What's the JS equivalent of "place an index.php file in a folder to deploy"? What's the JS FOSS equivalent of ProcessWire as a CMF + CMS? What's the JS equivalent to e.g. DreamHost and other drag + drop hosts? (Legitimately curious, and I'm mainly inquiring after equivalents-for...better-thans would definitely be interesting)

For JS, you need to setup a listener like PM2 and point it at the folder, but once that is done, you can drag and drop and index.js file into place and it'll all work as expected.

Re: PHP Popularity: Is it decreasing and what to do about it?

#26
post #4

PHP popularity is decreasing because there are better tools for the same niche today. The same happened for Perl in 00s. The same is happening for every web backend language, as JavaScript is becoming ubique due to it being the de facto and only choice for the web frontend. Maybe PHP can be made better, but it would need some radical changes and then the question is that if it’s worth the effort and maybe to pick up…

javascript has the advantage that front and backend can share code, but as a language it's much worse. php at least has been able to break backwards compat to fix its worst design mistakes, and natively has typing

Re: PHP Popularity: Is it decreasing and what to do about it?

#27
post #4

PHP popularity is decreasing because there are better tools for the same niche today. The same happened for Perl in 00s. The same is happening for every web backend language, as JavaScript is becoming ubique due to it being the de facto and only choice for the web frontend. Maybe PHP can be made better, but it would need some radical changes and then the question is that if it’s worth the effort and maybe to pick up…

No, languages simply matter much less than they once did due to widespread adoption of best practices and good design. The tooling around languages matters much more. C++ isn't still popular because it's the best language. Only real reason I'd always pick PHP over JS is not because I love PHP, but because Laravel is better than any node framework.

While you may pick, most developers do not. You are not the most developers, as you are special and probably much more talented.

They pick JS because they know the language best and are more productive in it than in Laravel. There is nothing Laravel can do about it - being best is not going to change the direction, because the limiting factor is the knowledge of programming languages of most of developers.

Re: PHP Popularity: Is it decreasing and what to do about it?

#28
post #4

PHP popularity is decreasing because there are better tools for the same niche today. The same happened for Perl in 00s. The same is happening for every web backend language, as JavaScript is becoming ubique due to it being the de facto and only choice for the web frontend. Maybe PHP can be made better, but it would need some radical changes and then the question is that if it’s worth the effort and maybe to pick up…

What's the JS equivalent of "place an index.php file in a folder to deploy"? What's the JS FOSS equivalent of ProcessWire as a CMF + CMS? What's the JS equivalent to e.g. DreamHost and other drag + drop hosts? (Legitimately curious, and I'm mainly inquiring after equivalents-for...better-thans would definitely be interesting)

People always seem to come up with the argument that you can drop an index.php in a folder and be done with it. Only nobody uses php that way since decades.

Modern php code uses Frameworks, Package mangers, opcode caching, and application servers. It’s just that other languages don’t carry all the cruft php has in its heritage…

Re: PHP Popularity: Is it decreasing and what to do about it?

#29
> Without steps like the big improvements in PHP 7 and laravel, PHP could potentially already be irrelevant today.

So what? What's wrong with PHP becoming irrelevant? Surely nobody would complain that ColdFusion is finally irrelevant. People should focus their time and energy on better solutions than PHP or ColdFusion.

Re: PHP Popularity: Is it decreasing and what to do about it?

#30

PHP has been supposedly dying for 15 years. It's always been super trendy to dunk on it, but in many respects it remains the best tool for specific jobs. And that's what matters. A language's hip factor is not particularly important to me.

This is what I call "The Fishtank Graph" (for obvious reasons).

It kinda says it all...

https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/programmin...

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