
Java will kill your startup. PHP will save it - PretzelFisch
https://medium.com/@alexkatrompas/java-will-kill-your-startup-php-will-save-it-f3051968145d
======
smt88
I spent about 10 years in a niche: maintaining legacy PHP software. I have
been down some very deep rabbitholes of PHP black magic. I have written 10+
medium-to-large applications from scratch in PHP, 4 of which are still running
in production more than 8 years later.

I feel qualified to say the following:

\- Java will not kill your startup. Bad coding MIGHT. But it also might not.

\- PHP will not save your startup. Good coding MIGHT. But it also might not.

\- You can write good/bad software in Java. I've seen both.

\- You can write bad software in PHP. I've never seen good software in PHP
(including my own). At this point, it's becoming hard to believe it is
possible to write good software in PHP.

Mostly this is a problem with the awful design of the language. Adding better
typing is helping, but at that point, why not just use something else?

Also, most arguments in favor of PHP mention its popularity. I suspect that if
you removed WordPress, Drupal, etc. from the calculation, you'd see PHP
plummet to the bottom. I don't know any young people who learn it anymore, and
I haven't met a startup building their product in PHP in many years.

~~~
beaconstudios
> I don't know any young people who learn it anymore, and I haven't met a
> startup building their product in PHP in many years.

That's a poor metric for whether you should use it though, as both groups tend
towards over-focusing on new "cool" tech stacks. I bet Vue would come up as
the top framework amongst these groups but it is certainly not yet battle-
tested.

~~~
scarface74
It matters being on the other side for one of the reason the article cited -
_PHP programmers are more plentiful and cheaper than Java programmers._

I worked for a company that had a legacy product that was written in PHP and
started hiring like crazy over the next year to bring an adjacent product to
market in .Net. But by year two, it was obvious that the new product was
something that the market didn’t want but they were getting more opportunities
on the legacy PHP side.

Within 6 months after they abandoned the .Net product and started focusing on
the PHP product, every single developer -14 in all left - starting with me. I
called recruiters the same day that they announced they were focusing on PHP
and left within a month.

The only reason it took 6 months was that some were close to thier three year
vesting period and one or two others were closing on a house.

None of us were going to waste our time doing PHP. We knew there was no money
in being a “PHP Developer”. Looking at LinkedIn, none of us mentioned that we
ever touched PHP, we didn’t want recruiters wasting our time.

~~~
mywittyname
> We knew there was no money in being a “PHP Developer”.

The hate on PHP is real, but I think it's completely unjustified. I do a lot
of work in PHP because is a great tool for anything web or Linux related. I
can get code that works out the door quickly and it will happily run for years
without issue.

I think the biggest issue with PHP is that it made software development much
more accessible. I've worked on a few projects over the years that were
started by some domain expert with no experience in programming. They are able
to cobble a workable product together by reading a few chapters of a web
development book.

~~~
scarface74
_The hate on PHP is real, but I think it 's completely unjustified. I do a lot
of work in PHP because is a great tool for anything web or Linux related. I
can get code that works out the door quickly and it will happily run for years
without issue._

The issue is not "hating" on the technical merits of PHP. The issue is going
where the money is. PHP developers don't make nearly as much as C#/Java/NodeJS
developers.

~~~
beaconstudios
as an ex-PHP and current React/Node developer, I think that's because the tech
market is pretty irrational. I could get a lot more done in PHP than I can in
Node, and laravel blade templates are much harder to get wrong than your
average react app that didn't need to be an SPA in the first place.

------
jareds
We are no longer living in the days of EJB 2 and Websphere 6. Springboot
allows you to get started quickly with out spending a week configuring your
app server and Java beans. The article should have been titled "Using
enterprise Java technology from 15 years ago will kill your startup. PHP will
save it."

~~~
theandrewbailey
Seconded. Even bare Java EE development hardly needs XML configuration
anymore, since about EE 7 (maybe 6?).

~~~
jareds
At least with my work Java EE 6 and WebSphere 8 brought pretty decent
annotation support. WebSphere Liberty looked pretty nice from the little I
used it, but that was several years ago.

------
baud147258
Writes "This post isn’t really about Java vs. PHP" then spent three quarters
of the article doing just that.

~~~
icc97
It is an annoying click-baity title, but his point is that you could replace
Python or Ruby with PHP.

You then lose the popularity argument that comes with PHP but the rest of the
article I think is still relevant.

~~~
baud147258
But if you remove the click-bait part of comparison between the languages,
there's not a lot of thing left.

------
ram_rar
I think, the author hasn't followed Java stack since Java 8. With things like
variable handles, type inferencing and frameworks like Play, Spring boot. Its
become fairly easy to kick off a new CRUD based web app.

------
kevwil
God I hate clickbait. At least the author has the nerve to admit the
inflamatory intent, so that's something I guess. That is all, carry on.

------
thewileyone
A badly coded PHP solution is a headache to maintain and support. A badly code
Java solution is a brain tumor.

