We Don't Hate PHP

And to be sure, modern PHP is better. The beginnings of typing, the fixing of horrible standard library behaviors, and an ecosystem with package management are game changers. But to me, all of that means nothing if the ecosystem is primarily running legacy apps. There are clearly proponents of modern PHP that embrace the new PHP, but what really gives it any modern relevance is old school apps like Mediawiki, phpBB, etc. and I feel like they all underscore what I dislike about PHP: not a single problem but a mindset that is incompatible with modern internet. There is no assumption of shared nothing; most apps assume the disk can be used for persistence. And it’s tricky to dockerize a PHP app effectively since you typically need multiple processes; I know there’s work on an app server in PHP itself but last I checked it was for development, and rather I ended up using uWSGIs embedded PHP support as the only solution I could even find that could do this in a way that wasn’t horrifically ugly or intensive.

It still has its issues. For me the prime issue with PHP is the execution model. I am not in for my document root being my source dir. This weird behavior comes from the CGI era and to this day it doesn’t really feel like there is intent to move away from it. Rather, the age old front controller pattern is poised as a “solution,” entangling web server, PHP and application configuration together in some unholy mess, versus the modern pattern of having an app server.

Source: consulted at two companies that survived dot com crash recently, which were PHP shops. They are a node/java shop now. And mentioning PHP will get you fired.

With Python I'd be stuck reading the latest tutorial on how to deploy virtualenv properly. Java/Spring I'd die of boredom before I figure out where WebMvcAutoConfigurationAdapter wants me to put Bootstrap css this year. Sometimes you just want a quick solution to an easy problem and move on to other things than coding, and I find PHP fits that use case perfectly.

In practice it mainly means that, in exchange for process startup overhead added to your response times, you get to get away with being sloppy about how you initialize and dispose of resources. It's not something I have ever really regarded as a virtue, and it's one reason why PHP devs can have real trouble transitioning to platforms where the same assumption no longer holds.