Who is still using PHP anno 2021?
Everyone.
PHP 8.1.0
21–30 of 286 posts
Re: PHP 8.1.0
#22Still holding the web. Happy to see it is continually evolving.
What's your estimate for PHP's long-term viability?
I'm asking, because it was the hobbyists and kids who got started in PHP mucking around in their everyday white-label cPanel/Plesk-based web-hosting accounts in the very early 2000s that really gave PHP the mindshare of enthusiastic users and thus its staying power. But it's 2021 now: all the kids are getting started with NodeJS for server-side web-applications, not PHP.
With the decline of traditional web-hosting as something that people have and might experiment with (replaced at the low-end by Wix and Squarespace, and major "Cloud" providers at the high-end), what opportunities does PHP have to attract new eyeballs?
Years ago self-hosted WordPress and phpBB installs would have been been a good gateway, but both of those are going out of fashion owing to the substantial maintenance burden that comes with self-hosting. Everyone I know that used to self-host WordPress (former clients, friends, local small businesses, etc) have all given-up and switched to WordPress.com's managed-hosting model or gone with the aforementioned Wix and Squarespace.
Ultimately PHP as-we-know-it will last as long as Zend (UPDATE: it's now owned by Perforce?!? wow...) can secure sales/support funding, which is predicated on their continued penetration of major enterprise customers - or indirectly through the continued popularity of WordPress and the like, even if it's hardly ever self-hosted anymore.
Personally, my money's on maybe 5-10 years' continued credibility, and then another 15 years of slow decline into irrelevance.
Re: PHP 8.1.0
#23Everyone laughing at PHP hasn't tried it for years, I'd bet. It started clumsy, true, but it became a solid and quite elegant way of doing things. And by things I don't mean just web development. The current limitations I see in PHP is that there is not an official multi-core coroutines solution.
I've used PHP recently to work on Phabricator, and the whole "yes it sucked but now it's good" narrative did not match my experience at all. Sure it might have added modern features but the core is still rotten.
The alternative would have to be TCL levels of bad to make me choose PHP.
Re: PHP 8.1.0
#24Everyone laughing at PHP hasn't tried it for years, I'd bet. It started clumsy, true, but it became a solid and quite elegant way of doing things. And by things I don't mean just web development. The current limitations I see in PHP is that there is not an official multi-core coroutines solution.
I've used PHP recently to work on Phabricator, and the whole "yes it sucked but now it's good" narrative did not match my experience at all. Sure it might have added modern features but the core is still rotten. The alternative would have to be TCL levels of bad to make me choose PHP.
Phabricator is not written in "modern PHP", so your experience is not surprising
Re: PHP 8.1.0
#25Who is still using PHP anno 2021?
Considering just WordPress powers something like 40% of the whole www, I'd say quite a few people!
Re: PHP 8.1.0
#26Still holding the web. Happy to see it is continually evolving.
What's your estimate for PHP's long-term viability? I'm asking, because it was the hobbyists and kids who got started in PHP mucking around in their everyday white-label cPanel/Plesk-based web-hosting accounts in the very early 2000s that really gave PHP the mindshare of enthusiastic users and thus its staying power. But it's 2021 now: all the kids are getting started with NodeJS for server-side web-applications, not…
80% of the web is powered by PHP and 40% of that is WordPress which has continued to grow. 64% of CMS websites are WordPress. There’s what gets upvotes, and then there’s what is widely used, supported, easy to hire devs for and practical as hell. PHP, unlike Perl which I used to contribute to, is here to stay.
Re: PHP 8.1.0
#27Everyone laughing at PHP hasn't tried it for years, I'd bet. It started clumsy, true, but it became a solid and quite elegant way of doing things. And by things I don't mean just web development. The current limitations I see in PHP is that there is not an official multi-core coroutines solution.
I've used PHP recently to work on Phabricator, and the whole "yes it sucked but now it's good" narrative did not match my experience at all. Sure it might have added modern features but the core is still rotten. The alternative would have to be TCL levels of bad to make me choose PHP.
Phabricator, much like WordPress, kind of lives in its own world and hasn't adopted most aspects of modern PHP. Even as someone who works with PHP and enjoys it, I wouldn't want to use Phabricator.
Re: PHP 8.1.0
#28Everyone laughing at PHP hasn't tried it for years, I'd bet. It started clumsy, true, but it became a solid and quite elegant way of doing things. And by things I don't mean just web development. The current limitations I see in PHP is that there is not an official multi-core coroutines solution.
I used PHP about two years ago and I was not impressed at all with the improvements. Yes, some of the issues had been fixed, but many of them remained. I cannot see any reason for using it over JS, Python or Ruby.
Re: PHP 8.1.0
#29Fibers "allow blocking and non-blocking implementations to share the same API" That's an interesting contrast to Python where the need to use "value = await fn()" v.s. "value = fn()" depending on whether or not that function is awaitable causes all kinds of API design complexity, all the way up to the existence of tools like https://github.com/python-trio/unasync which can code-generate the non-async version of a lib…
Ruby has the same design where async is implemented on top of fibers.
Re: PHP 8.1.0
#30I've been using PHP since 5.x. Often had to work on older 4.x web apps. I find it interesting when I read people saying "PHP has come a long way. It's a proper language now, etc."
If you work long enough with a language and figure out most its quirks, it's a breeze. It's nice that they are adding all these new features, but they are hardly what makes it or break it for me.
Here is the one features that is taken for granted in "modern stacks":
Edit file -> Alt+tab ctrl+R. Oops, Alt+tab fix -> Alt+tab ctrl+R.
When debugging I can do that 50 times a minute. With my react app, I can do it maybe 5 times a minute. With my golang app I'm lucky if I can do it twice a minute.