

PHP is dead. - pavel_lishin
http://blargh.tommymontgomery.com/2010/07/php-is-dead/

======
elbrodeur
It's really annoying whenever anyone declares a widely used platform as dead.

PHP, like most things, has a lifecycle. If we know anything about scripting
languages, they're incredibly resilient. PERL, for instance -- a language
nearly 25 years old -- seems to be updated with less frequency than PHP, but
continues to be used and developed. Not just to maintain legacy
infrastructure, but to build new products.

Even if we're witnessing the sunset of PHP's development -- which I doubt is
the case -- it'll be a very long time before it dies.

~~~
apl

      > PERL, for instance -- a language nearly 25 years old --
      > seems to be updated with less frequency than PHP,
    

While there was a discernible lull in the mid-2000s, development of Perl 5 is
in surprisingly good shape right now. Also, it's not an acronym.

------
dsl
PHP's biggest problem is the people who demand OO features out of a procedural
language.

If you want classes, namespaces, anonymous functions, etc. use a different
fucking language. Don't bitch when the feature you want is a shoehorned in
piece of crap.

Stop polluting an otherwise useful language.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I certainly agree with the sentiment that forces are pulling PHP where it
isn't comfortable being.

"You don't hammer in nails with the handle of a screwdriver." was something my
Dad used to say and I thought it was pretty stupid, until I thought of it as a
metaphor for all the times my 'pain' was that I had the wrong tool in my hand
and was too blind to see that.

People are trying to PHP in ways it can't easily go, and yet that is the
requirement the user's have, thus PHP is by definition the wrong tool. Tools
which do not serve a purpose as well as other tools don't get used. A
language, system, or tool which nobody uses is 'dead'. QED.

~~~
rokhayakebe
Can you give a simple example for this _PHP is by definition the wrong tool_ ?
Maybe a common problem being solved in php which should be done in another
language.

~~~
ChuckMcM
The first part was the context,

 _"People are trying to [take] PHP in ways it can't easily go ..."_

Tools make hard jobs doable, the right tool for the job can make a difficult
job trivially easy. The definition of the 'right' tool can then be expressed
as 'doesn't cause you pain' and the inverse works as well, if your tool is
causing you pain then it is not the right tool for what you're trying to
accomplish.

Probably an example of tm;du (too meta; didn't understand) :-)

------
tekacs
Hurray! :)

Ok, no, no that's not fair, but it'd be nice to see people move over to other
languages, if only because many of them strongly encourage the use of web
frameworks which inspire (or force) better coding practices.

It'll be refreshing to see that my data _isn't_ being compromised by every
website I visit because their PHP/MySQLi code is vulnerable to SQL
injection...

~~~
infinity
I'm sorry to bring the bad news, but SQL injection vulnerabilities are not a
problem of the combination of PHP and MySQL. You can have the same problems
with most other combinations of a scripting language and a backend database,
for example ASP and Microsoft SQL Server.

The true lesson is: Don't assume user's input is ok for SQL queries. All input
is evil!

------
Rust
Is there an alternative to PHP that is as easy to setup? It seems that most
languages require another server process running in the background (Tomcat,
Ruby, etc.) and a web server to proxy requests. Is it old-fashioned to like
the way Apache and PHP work together (and even nginx with PHP-FPM)?

~~~
geon
In some languages (Racket, Common Lisp, Haskell), it's easy to make the
webserver part of your application. Then it's just a "server process running
in the background".

------
mikegreenberg
Did anyone even notice the date on that? July 2010. Why would you even dig
this up?

~~~
phoyd
July 2010? Apparently, PHP dies a horrible, slow death.

------
mooism2
As there are lots of people apparently still happily using PHP 4, it will
presumably take a long time for PHP to die out in the wild, even if the PHP
core team decides tomorrow to call it a day.

