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

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

#71

Post by mixmastamyk »

boringuser2 wrote: post #67
DonHopkins wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't be such an apologist for terrible careless programming language design, expecting professional programmers to tolerate IDE's "yelling at them" about unforced language design flaws and loaded footguns, using terribly designed languages that were mindlessly thrown together by anti-intellectual amateurs like Rasmus Lerdorf, a self proclaimed "not a real programmer", who says he doesn't even like programming, who d…

You're probably a joy to work with, huh? You've got be more flexible than this, come on.

We have an embarrassment of floss riches today. No need to support a poor design.

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

#72

Post by vi2837 »

miohtama wrote: 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…

There are few factors why PHP popularity is decreasing, not because it is really bad. But very often other languages build its popularity on promoting how "bad" is PHP. It is also no longer fashionable as it was in the beginning, but other language promoted as such. And more.. So, I think, rebranding and good marketing could help here.

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

#75

Post by DonHopkins »

miohtama wrote: post #27
boringuser2 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"From my perspective, the point of all these "PHP is broken" rants is not just to complain, but to help educate and potentially warn off new coders starting new codebases. Some fine, even historic work has been done in PHP despite the madness, unquestionably. But now we need to work together to fix what is broken. The best way to fix the PHP problem at this point is to make the alternatives so outstanding that the choice of the better hammer becomes obvious." -Jeff Atwood

https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-php-singularity/

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

#76

Post by DonHopkins »

boringuser2 wrote: post #63
miohtama wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

With GPT, I don't really find that I am more "productive" in one scripting language or another given that it has the ability to perfectly translate between them on the fly.

Perfectly? Oh really? Have you tried actually reading the code you're copying and pasting from ChatGPT into production? Are you actually letting it do all your architectural design and security auditing for you, too?

If ChatGPT is already perfectly solving all of your programming problems, then you should learn a lot more about programing, design, architecture, and security, so you can take on more challenging projects, and actually design decent APIs and architectures, instead of just paint-by-number monkey coding, and produce better more thoughtful designs and code than an LLM, because your job is already obsolete.

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

#77

Post by mekster »

9dev wrote: post #28
themodelplumber wrote: post #11

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)

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…

> Modern php code uses Frameworks, Package mangers, opcode caching, and application servers.

How do these change the way you can deploy PHP files by simply uploading them?

For frameworks, all you do is run a single command to install.

If you mean JS package managers, that's agnostic to what language you use.

Opcode caching doesn't require anything special from deployment point of view and I don't see a need for app server for PHP.

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

#78

Post by steve_adams_86 »

belmont_sup wrote: post #69
themodelplumber wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the info! > AWS, Azure, Google, CloudFlare, Digital Ocean, etc I'm always curious to know if there are more casual options in this space, for non-earthshaking projects. Maybe more like how DO was at the beginning?

Handful of great new hosts I’ve seen pop up: Render.com, Fly.io, northflank. And I actually like AWS lambdas, so great option for me is SST.dev, which wraps AWS CDK, and provides an actual live development workflow with actual AWS resources.

I’ve been using fly.io for little things and it’s remarkably nice and easy to use. I can’t vouch for large scale projects, but for little things you want to experiment with it’s a joy.

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

#80

Post by archerx »

DonHopkins wrote: post #41
themodelplumber wrote: post #11

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)

What is the PHP equivalent of writing your front end and back end in the same language so you can share libraries and data and not have to switch gears between two different languages each time you look up or down the stack? There is a HUGE advantage to using the same language in the browser and on the server, and PHP isn't ever going to displace JavaScript in the browser. So JavaScript it is. That ship sailed a LONG…

I like switching gears, I truly don’t find it an advantage using the language for both. Have separate languages makes the distinction between backend world and front end world very clear. Also the backend code is mostly data manipulation and the front end code is mostly rendering so there is very little overlap in similar functions for both. The separation helps keep things tidy in my brain.

I much prefer not having to write JavaScript everywhere, not every problem is a nail and not every solution requires a hammer.

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