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PHP is worth learning and using

bulletproofphp.dev

121–130 of 468 posts

Re: PHP is worth learning and using

#121
post #12
post #3

This seems like a desperate attempt to justify not moving on from a language whose death knell rang a long time ago. You might as well try to convince me I should start my next business with cutting edge software written in Fortran or COBOL.

Here’s something to think about: You and some buddies start a startup whose product is a complicated piece of medical software that uses Tensorflow’s inference but most of it is written in Go. Cool stuff, you’d never do that in PHP. You’re getting ready to launch, and you’re going to need a marketing site and a site with documentation and help articles for users. Do you write that site in Go? Hell no. You hire someon…

Somewhat related, what's the Go laravel/rails/django equivalent?

Re: PHP is worth learning and using

#122
PHP is perfectly fine, and all of the "better languages" are only better in an academic sense. But you can't really use PHP. It's too uncool. If you use PHP in 2021, you had better have a really good understanding with your manager, because your manager may read that PHP is "bad" or "a fractal of bad design" and start to question your competence.

Re: PHP is worth learning and using

#123
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you like PHP, great. Do you plan on creating a start-up that you intend to scale to a babillion customers? That you intend to hire teams of developers for? Probably not a good idea. Are you a new programmer trying to figure out which language to learn first? Absolutely not. Python, Java, JavaScript, C# are much more flexible if nothing else. Anybody who tries to convince new programmers to learn PHP is doing them…

Except Facebook literally did that :) But I agree with you.

Wikipedia too. And probably many WordPress websites with a lot of traffic.

If anything, PHP has proven it works in this regard.

Re: PHP is worth learning and using

#124
The closest this post gets to supporting its thesis is this section:

> You might have heard people say that PHP was "doing serverless before serverless was a thing", and this is kind of true.

I believe that PHP is...not bad I guess? I'm sure it can make good things. But after reading this I have no idea why I would pick up PHP over any of the other capable tools out there.

Re: PHP is worth learning and using

#125

Hmmm... Most points in this article are shouting "yeah we have those too!!" but it didn't give any convincing arguments why I (or anybody who doesn't already know PHP) would like to learn and use PHP over other decent modern languages and ecosystems, which happen to have those points as well.

for me the biggest advantage is the size of the market. I know Python and PHP quite decent but I've never found any quick job (or long time job) for my Python skills. For PHP I have to convey some of jobs to others, I am getting so much of them (I even run some job advertisement site only for the purpose to redirect people pinging me with offers, really).

But maybe this is just me.

Re: PHP is worth learning and using

#126

I don't really understand the reasons for using PHP outside of that people are already familiar with it and like working with it or want to find jobs in that area. If someone is new to software development and in an area of the world where it's not mostly PHP shops, so bigger cities, I don't really understand the benefit. PHP is often used to do certain things or it may be faster for you to whip something up in Larav…

A very pragmatic reason exists: deployment is dead simple for users with very little technical skill. Deploying PHP software is as easy as subscribing to a shared web host (expensive or not, but most will make your life easy), connecting using FTP/SFTP, and extracting a ZIP file into the main directory. Some hosts even skip the last couple of steps and let you apply a template with a well-known PHP CMS to get you sta…

This argument may have worked in the years before Heroku (or Docker even) but it’s really outdated in 2021.

Then you have the myriad of static site hosts that also take 2 clicks to host something without even having to write any code.

Re: PHP is worth learning and using

#127

Hmmm... Most points in this article are shouting "yeah we have those too!!" but it didn't give any convincing arguments why I (or anybody who doesn't already know PHP) would like to learn and use PHP over other decent modern languages and ecosystems, which happen to have those points as well.

for me the biggest advantage is the size of the market. I know Python and PHP quite decent but I've never found any quick job (or long time job) for my Python skills. For PHP I have to convey some of jobs to others, I am getting so much of them (I even run some job advertisement site only for the purpose to redirect people pinging me with offers, really). But maybe this is just me.

Good jobs though? Lots of PHP jobs in Canada, but the salary is nearly universally always laughably low.

Re: PHP is worth learning and using

#128
post #12
post #3

This seems like a desperate attempt to justify not moving on from a language whose death knell rang a long time ago. You might as well try to convince me I should start my next business with cutting edge software written in Fortran or COBOL.

Here’s something to think about: You and some buddies start a startup whose product is a complicated piece of medical software that uses Tensorflow’s inference but most of it is written in Go. Cool stuff, you’d never do that in PHP. You’re getting ready to launch, and you’re going to need a marketing site and a site with documentation and help articles for users. Do you write that site in Go? Hell no. You hire someon…

100% agree. I can go to any number of hosting providers and have a working WordPress site or even a simple PHP Server up in minutes, the longest part of which is entering my credit card number. Then there's an almost infinite number of agencies that can use an almost infinite number of plugins to make it look nice, perform well and do lots of stuff. If the site isn't more than a marketing front-cum-webshop, honestly, I see no reason to use anything other than PHP.

Re: PHP is worth learning and using

#129

I don't really understand the reasons for using PHP outside of that people are already familiar with it and like working with it or want to find jobs in that area. If someone is new to software development and in an area of the world where it's not mostly PHP shops, so bigger cities, I don't really understand the benefit. PHP is often used to do certain things or it may be faster for you to whip something up in Larav…

A very pragmatic reason exists: deployment is dead simple for users with very little technical skill. Deploying PHP software is as easy as subscribing to a shared web host (expensive or not, but most will make your life easy), connecting using FTP/SFTP, and extracting a ZIP file into the main directory. Some hosts even skip the last couple of steps and let you apply a template with a well-known PHP CMS to get you sta…

Does this really hold true in an App Service world? Just load your repo and go.

Re: PHP is worth learning and using

#130

I don't really understand the reasons for using PHP outside of that people are already familiar with it and like working with it or want to find jobs in that area. If someone is new to software development and in an area of the world where it's not mostly PHP shops, so bigger cities, I don't really understand the benefit. PHP is often used to do certain things or it may be faster for you to whip something up in Larav…

A very pragmatic reason exists: deployment is dead simple for users with very little technical skill. Deploying PHP software is as easy as subscribing to a shared web host (expensive or not, but most will make your life easy), connecting using FTP/SFTP, and extracting a ZIP file into the main directory. Some hosts even skip the last couple of steps and let you apply a template with a well-known PHP CMS to get you sta…

> Hey presto, you have a functioning web shop, business website, charity home page, or whatever other thing you want.

If we're talking about simple templates to open a store or a simple landing page there are so many no-code options like Wix/Shopify/SquareSpace/Square that I don't think PHP offers any significant advantage.

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