PHP is worth learning and using

> You seem to be referring to an area where people pay pennies + have almost zero programming experience so they want to launch a project with clicks.

Over my career, I've worked with companies using PHP in sales. One of those had over a million customer subscriptions, the other was a multi-national looking at PHP for a greenfield e-commerce project. I noticed working in Europe some high-growth agencies that use PHP.

> So tell me again, why should I use PHP? How will it truly help me? What does it do better than everyone else?

> But I thought we were discussing the actual programming?

Your original question just said "use PHP". PHP is a general purpose web scripting language. It's similar to Python or Ruby. It is generally more performant and later versions have a gradual type system. It's traditionally run as a shared-nothing single-threaded script, which makes it easy to reason about, and in real life has proved to be a stable way to run things in production, as it avoid bugs that can arise around stale state, multi-threading and it keeps running if other libraries have bugs that leak memory.

Later versions have introduced a JIT and support for concurrency concepts such as fibres, as in the upcoming PHP 8.1 https://php.watch/versions/8.1/fibers.

Arguably, the thing that would make you use it over Python, or Ruby, is the ecosystem, especially around content management and e-commerce, as the language itself is roughly comparable to others. Also I think there are more agencies that support PHP, rather than Python or Ruby.

Is JIT enabled and configured for PHP?

Since $x is an array, it will get rejected at runtime by `function f(int $a)`. So this `array` type is limited but useful.

You can also add annotations like `/* @var []int */`. External tools (psalm, phpstan) use annotations in their static analysis of the code and will raise an error if $x elements are not integers.

Of course, it's far from Haskell, but my experience with types in PHP is smoother than in Python. Though it was 2 years ago in Python, and the environnement has probably matured.

In my opinion, a worse problem with PHP is that classes properties are dynamic. `class A {}; $a=new A; $a->x=1;` is perfectly valid and will add a property to the object that does not exist in the class. There's no simple way to forbid this, even at runtime (hacking the magic `__set()` creates other pain points).

> It's traditionally run as a shared-nothing single-threaded script, which makes it easy to reason about, and in real life has proved to be a stable way to run things in production.

I think we have a vastly differing definition of "in production". I'll agree PHP was good enough for plenty of things, and likely still is. But good enough in general to run things in production as it's understood today? You'll find that many people will disagree with you here, not just me.

> Later versions have introduced a JIT and support for concurrency concepts such as fibres, as in the upcoming PHP 8.1 https://php.watch/versions/8.1/fibers.

That's what I mean, not only for PHP but for like 99% of all programming languages: they play catch-up, waaaaaaaaay too slowly and gradually, with things that should be baseline by now. Happily Erlang/Elixir are having lightweight and transparent parallelism and concurrency for a long time now. Languages like Go and Rust also progressed very well in this area so I am looking to work more with them in the future as well.

---

I think you and I are not aligned on what is "successful" or "good enough". You seem to insist that statistical success speaks something of the merits of a technology, and this is where I and many others disagree: people just adapt to what's given to them. That doesn't say almost anything about if the thing is good or not. People simply get what they can. Back then PHP was available so they took that. The rest is post-hoc rationalization. Stretching the simple and isolated historical fact "people used PHP because there was nothing else viable at the time" to mean that "PHP is good and successful" is where I'll disagree with you.

But yep, we severely digressed from the original discussion. I am OK with that though.