PHP is the new JavaScript?

Python is pretty magical in places. PHP is slightly magical in places. But Ruby is magical everywhere.

From the title I wasn’t sure whether it means PHP is improving or is going south.

If an ORM can't be used to access a valid database, then that ORM sucks. (ORMs often suck for additional reasons, but that one's pretty hard to ignore if you have an existing database that you need to interact with.)

There are perfectly valid uses for composite keys. In a table that indicates a relationship between multiple other objects, for example.

> I have a vague feeling that some of my coworkers looked down on Laravel. Less dependency injection, more weird magic.

Well, you can rest easy knowing it probably wasn't just a vague feeling, because I'm pretty sure every moderately experienced programmer who has tried both and went with Symfony feels that way.

Laravel was clearly written from the ground up with one goal above all else: to make it was easy as possible for beginners to write babby's first website as fast as humanly possible. Every other essential aspect of such a framework (maintainability, modularity, code clarity, ease of debugging complex issues, etc) was thrown to the wayside in favor of that one main goal, which is why there's so much "magic" everywhere. You're expected to just blindly trust the magic and never look behind the curtain. Unfortunately, beginner programmers that have no intention of ever evolving past their beginner phase are a huge audience nowadays, so you end up with many people who have never had to write or maintain a complex codebase hailing Laravel as the next coming of Christ.

This is all heavily reflected in this article: the author picks one of the most extremely simple use cases to implement, a 99% static page with a single dynamic variable that doesn't even seem to use a database. And despite the code being extremely simple, he still has to ask AI to write 90% of it for him because he isn't interested in learning how anything works, he isn't interested in expanding it or maintaining it in the future, he just wants to pump out the minimum viable product as fast as possible.

Always thought React (specifically JSX) made JavaScript "the new PHP" in that there is markup all mixed in with syntax that is so similar to old school PHP.

"New school PHP" frameworks like Laravel are nearly exactly like Ruby-on-Rails: The same MVC style, database and ORM built-in, Laravel is so similar to Rails in many ways.

I would say:

"Laravel is the new Rails"

and

"New PHP is the old Python/Ruby"

The original dev use case for Wordpress where you can easily put up a basic CRUD app with user logins and roles/permissions was largely displaced by Django, which is just a little bit more mature of a project for such tasks than Wordpress could ever be. WP never wanted devs anyway, they wanted bloggers - so a lot of people stopped writing PHP simply because WP lost popularity as a web framework.

PHP lost a ton of up-and-coming developers to Python (esp. in academia) and JavaScript (esp. to Node), in the same way Flash/AS3 lost developers to iOS/Android. Unlike Flash, PHP never really died - just kept hanging around.

It's not a bad language, brings back fond memories at least. But there's nothing about its performance or usability that stands out, and there's no core platform need for it the way there was with Wordpress. JavaScript has the browser DOM and Node, Python has AI/ML libraries and best practices that aren't available in other languages, and in terms of another PHP use case - all the dynamic languages can quickly start an http server on localhost now. There's just no use case for PHP.