Learn PHP in 2026 (Yes, Really)
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Learn PHP in 2026 (Yes, Really)
1–10 of 46 posts
Re: Learn PHP in 2026 (Yes, Really)
#2Please, if you want to persuade me, do it yourself. If you don’t believe in it enough to go through the effort to write the article, and instead ask an LLM to do it, it’s not going to convince me.
Re: Learn PHP in 2026 (Yes, Really)
#3Please, if you want to persuade me, do it yourself. If you don’t believe in it enough to go through the effort to write the article, and instead ask an LLM to do it, it’s not going to convince me.
I wish AI slop blogs would get banned with extreme prejudice. I guess there's a YC company that makes AI slop blogs, so it won't happen?
Re: Learn PHP in 2026 (Yes, Really)
#4In my professional career I've used Python, Ruby, TypeScript, Groovy, but in personal projects I always go with PHP. I'm just more productive with it. And I don't use all of the modern niceties of PHP, I use it exactly like it's still 2010. In my opinion, the dislike towards PHP stems from the same love for complexity that gave us all of the FP-obsession from roughly 2010-2020 (Scala, Clojure, F#, etc.)
Re: Learn PHP in 2026 (Yes, Really)
#5Please, if you want to persuade me, do it yourself. If you don’t believe in it enough to go through the effort to write the article, and instead ask an LLM to do it, it’s not going to convince me.
I wish AI slop blogs would get banned with extreme prejudice. I guess there's a YC company that makes AI slop blogs, so it won't happen?
I'm not so sure that it's full AI. Might have used it to clean up, but she does seem to want us to believe that it isn't.
Re: Learn PHP in 2026 (Yes, Really)
#6Here's a chart to replace the mockup with: https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_ma...
According to this data (the same data referenced by WordPress marketing blog posts[1], if it's legit enough for them it's legit enough for me) WordPress usage across the web stopped growing almost all at once in 2021, with the beginning of a decline this year.
You can see an increase of other contenders (Shopify, for example) but of note is also None, which is probably related to how LLMs have been making it incredibly easy to deliver a website even without a CMS.
1: https://wordpress.com/blog/2025/04/17/wordpress-market-share...
Re: Learn PHP in 2026 (Yes, Really)
#7Been using PHP for 20 years and have built multiple startups with it that went from ideas to exits.
Today's PHP is better than it has ever been. Are there some things that are rough around the edges? yes ofc. But there is no language that doesn't have that. It's all trade-offs.
Last week I switched from Nginx+FPM to FrankenPHP and my god even the deployment experience got 10x better.
Safe to say that if you haven't tried the language, give it a shot. Within a few days you'll know if it's a good fit for you or not!
Re: Learn PHP in 2026 (Yes, Really)
#8Been using PHP for 20 years and have built multiple startups with it that went from ideas to exits. Today's PHP is better than it has ever been. Are there some things that are rough around the edges? yes ofc. But there is no language that doesn't have that. It's all trade-offs. Last week I switched from Nginx+FPM to FrankenPHP and my god even the deployment experience got 10x better. Safe to say that if you haven't t…
FrankenPHP is really good but the reason perhaps PHP is left in the dust is that people reach for Typescript/Edge/Serverless hosts like Cloudflare
I personally blame Laravel for PHP's loss of relevance.
Re: Learn PHP in 2026 (Yes, Really)
#9Aside from the LLM smell, the most egregious thing about this article to me is simply implying that it's going to be much of a surprise to people that PHP has improved since the "fractal of bad design" days. The most popular Hacker News post that matches "php" in HN Algolia is this post from 2019:
https://stitcher.io/blog/php-in-2019
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19917655
And while sentiment is understandably mixed even then, I actually think a lot of people have already come around on PHP as being "not as bad as it once was", if not even "good".
Some of its reputation, though, hinges not on out-of-date internet commentary, but instead on the fact that in practice a lot of the PHP code that's still in production today is simply legacy code and not up to modern standards, and most of the time when someone says PHP, they really mean that PHP. I think that is actually the thing that is holding PHP back hard outside of bubbles like HN. And honestly, even though I don't hate modern PHP, I don't have many codebases that come to mind when I think about modern PHP that are exemplary. I actually was relatively impressed with the s9e TextFormatter library used by phpBB3 when I looked at it, but even that is dated by today's standards.
Still, I think that PHP has an undeservedly bad reputation relative to other languages. I've recently come back into Python lately after having not really touched a ton of Python in a while and I gotta say, other than `uv` and `ty`, I don't feel a whole lot has improved in Python land. It's not that greenlets and gevent were fantastic or anything, but I thought it was satisfactory enough. Now that there's also asyncio, it feels like a nightmare trying to untangle old code and bring it into the async future... So many things just don't really work in this world, like old-school lazy fetching in SQLAlchemy. Python was most famous for the horrible Python 3000 migration, but so many years later and I'm not sure how much was really learned as reconciling greenlet and asyncio worlds feels like yet another Sisyphean task of trying to rebuild everything at once. OK, it isn't as bad, especially since you can at least wrap sync code into thread pools, but it definitely is an absolute PITA, and I feel like what we're getting out of it doesn't exceed what we're putting in.
So that's my thoughts. Internet commentary is probably no longer PHP's biggest enemy; instead, it's more like its own past successes. (And, also, the fact that we easily forgive the tools we use regularly for the faults that we have been used to for years.)
Re: Learn PHP in 2026 (Yes, Really)
#10In my professional career I've used Python, Ruby, TypeScript, Groovy, but in personal projects I always go with PHP. I'm just more productive with it. And I don't use all of the modern niceties of PHP, I use it exactly like it's still 2010. In my opinion, the dislike towards PHP stems from the same love for complexity that gave us all of the FP-obsession from roughly 2010-2020 (Scala, Clojure, F#, etc.)
I use it for my backend stuff. Robust, fast, safe, well-supported. Has all the right bells and whistles.
I never liked the language, but it does what it says on the tin.
I have found, in the project currently under development, that LLMs give very good PHP code. Better than mine, and I’ve been using it for 25 years. I don’t mind admitting that. PHP isn’t my main language (Swift is, and I’m still better than the LLM, for that).