
Ask HN: Is PHP still relevant? - hyper_rant
Would you say it&#x27;s worth investing the time to get good at it?
======
codegeek
Depends on what you want out of it.

\- Jobs. There are plenty of PHP jobs. Some pay low but plenty pay high as
well. I doubt there are jobs in backend languages that can beat PHP in terms
of volume. But again, may be you don't care about volume and options.

\- Ease of installation: Almost all web hosts have a default LAMP stack where
P is PHP. You can setup a php website in few seconds, literally. Compiled
languages may have a single binary but they still some tuning and the sheer
volume of PHP servers make it easy for anyone to get started. But compared to
other interpreted languages (looking at you Python), deployment is the
easiest.

\- Composer: I think it is an underrated package management tool. Well managed
and does the job. If you are used to npm horrors, composer is a welcome
change.

\- WordPress. Have to talk about WordPress when it comes to PHP. Powers like
30% of ENTIRE world's websites. That is big. So yea, PHP not going anywhere
anytime soon. And No, clients don't give a shit if PHP sucks. They don't.

\- Laravel/Symfony: Awesome full-stack frameworks. You can build anything
quickly using Laravel. If you are more creative, you can use symfony
components to build your own. Both are awesome.

\- PHP 7: Game changer compared to PHP 5.x. Google it.

\- Documentation and support systems: Google and you will get an answer to
almost any PHP related question. Try that with some of the shinier languages.

There are obviously lot of negatives as well but since you asked, I would say
it is VERY relevant and will remain so for a while.

~~~
Chyzwar
I disagree on all these points.

> \- Jobs. There are plenty of PHP jobs. Some pay low but plenty pay high as
> well. I doubt there are jobs in backend languages that can beat PHP in terms
> of volume. But again, may be you don't care about volume and options.

Jobs in UK on Indeed.co.uk

    
    
      - javascript developer: 8,978 jobs with average salary £48,921
      - java developer  6,145 jobs with average salary £52,690
      - python developer 3,702 jobs with average salary £58,250 
      - php developer 2,889 jobs with average salary £36,977
    

PHP can only do web backend poorly. If you do not care about options and
salary choose PHP.

> \- Ease of installation: Almost all web hosts have a default LAMP stack
> where P is PHP. You can setup a php website in few seconds, literally.
> Compiled languages may have a single binary but they still some tuning and
> the sheer volume of PHP servers make it easy for anyone to get started. But
> compared to other interpreted languages (looking at you Python), deployment
> is the easiest.

Not longer the case. I can use Heroku, Fargate, FaaS, AWS Elastic Beanstalk,
Ansible, Kubernetes, Gitlab to name few to have more robust and modern
deployment than FTP manually files to a shared server. Compared to the above
PHP is for amateurs.

> Composer: I think it is an underrated package management tool. Well managed
> and does the job. If you are used to npm horrors, composer is a welcome
> change.

NPM is package manager and composer is just dependency manager. Compared to
npm it is a very limited tool. npm let you install transient dependencies with
different versions, perform a security audit, publish packages, run scripts
and more.

> \- WordPress. Have to talk about WordPress when it comes to PHP. Powers like
> 30% of ENTIRE world's websites. That is big. So yea, PHP not going anywhere
> anytime soon. And No, clients don't give a shit if PHP sucks. They don't.

Wordpress jobs pay poorly. Client care when WordPress site gets hacked and
show advertising of canadian pharmacy or porn. Wordpress has a terrible
security track record.

> \- Laravel/Symfony: Awesome full-stack frameworks. You can build anything
> quickly using Laravel. If you are more creative, you can use symfony
> components to build your own. Both are awesome.

Laravel is just poor man copy of RoR. There is nothing special here. RoR,
Django, and Spring are more mature frameworks with better tooling and
ecosystem.

> \- PHP 7: Game changer compared to PHP 5.x. Google it.

It just added a bit of permanence. It is very slow compared to node.js, java,
go.

> \- Documentation and support systems: Google and you will get an answer to
> almost any PHP related question. Try that with some of the shinier
> languages.

PHP is brain damaging dump of random people hacky scripts.

------
x0hm
Yes. Any language in which you can be productive is worth investing time in.

And since this question is stemming from something bigger: Please don't listen
to the development community when it comes to things like "which language
should I or shouldn't I learn", because the development community is full of
zealots with huge egos that know very little about software outside of their
own bubble.

~~~
scarface74
I’m far away from a zealot, but looking at where the money is, it isn’t PHP.

~~~
codegeek
Money has nothing to do with a specific language. It comes down to how good
you are as a developer. There are plenty of high paying jobs where PHP is used
as a backend language. I don't understand this argument about how PHP doesn't
have money. It is true that PHP has a lot of low quality programmers due to
barrier to entry and WordPress tweaks but that is not it.

~~~
scarface74
It doesn’t matter how good of an AppleSoft Basic programmer you are, if no one
wants a Basic programmer, you aren’t going to make any money.

On the other hand, if the market is saturated with developers of a language,
you still can’t command a high salary.

It also doesn’t matter if you’re a “10x developer” if all the company wants is
another software as a service CRUD app.

Companies who want good developers who are interested in their career and
technology aren’t doing PHP.

From a personal anecdote, I worked for a company that had one legacy product
that was written in PHP and one new product that was written in C#. The
company couldn’t get any traction on their new project but was getting
business modifying their legacy PHP product. Once we as developers saw that
the roadmap for the next year was doing PHP, all 14 developers left within the
next three months.

None of us wanted to waste a year of our life and put on our resume that we
wrote a “PHP website”.

------
superasn
I would say most definitely.

Regardless of all the koolaid peddled these days by all the dev blogs, the
fact is that at the end of the day to make a website you can still use the
same backend that you used in 2005 (aka lamp) and it still works flawlessly
for most of the sites (or any site getting less than 1M hits a month which is
quite common).

If you want to get shit done quickly PHP is still as relevant as ever imo.

~~~
kyriakos
Massive sites like pornhub get millions of hits per hour using php. I'd say
php scales quite well too.

------
saluki
The Laravel Framework makes PHP relevant for me.

I'm not s huge fan of PHP but using Laravel is a great development experience.

Laravel is a great PHP Framework, with a great community, check it out if you
haven't already.

laravel.com forge.laravel.com laracasts.com [https://laravel-
news.com/laracon-2018-videos](https://laravel-news.com/laracon-2018-videos)

------
UK-Al05
Ultimately what qualities do you like in languages? PHP is easy, has cheap
ubiquitous hosting,, dynamically typed, and focuses on being productive and
getting something out door fast.

I like think about correctness, safety, static type systems, and generally
trying to catch things at compile time.

As a result I like Haskell, rust, ml, elm etc I'm not a much of fan of PHP,
but I can see why people use it.

------
JohnFen
That depends on your situation.

Generally, I think it's worth investing the time to get good at every language
you can. When you learn a different language, you also learn things that can
help you be better at using the other languages you know.

------
ohiovr
If it would allow you to hack, manipulate, contribute, to projects you like,
or if you have some simple or interesting tools you want to try. After the
third language the fourth is 40% figured out In an hour or so.

------
ithilglin909
YES to whether it's relevant. Regardless of opinions about PHP as a language,
it's way too widely utilized to be irrelevant in the near future.

Whether it's worth investing time to be a PHP master is subjective.
Personally, I won't be excited about being a crackerjack PHP dev, but if you
find certain aspects of working with PHP compelling and suited to whatever
you're building, it may be worthwhile. There's also plenty of work out there
for people with PHP skills, so it could be pretty relevant with regard to
employment.

------
dgarud
Recently I installed bugzilla (developed in php). Its pretty amazing what
people can create considering all were volunteers.

First I tried to install in windows, eventually gave up as the DB driver was
not installing and had a whole bunch of compiling issues. Then installed on
ubuntu after lot of bumps - I had to go all over the internet to troubleshoot
lot of major / minor issues.

It seems lot of hard work went into php earlier (bugzilla needs a lot of
modules) but now people are moving on to newer stuff.

------
enosanto
The answer depends on your use case. If you need to do fast prototyping and
quick shipping, especially for web apps, I'd say PHP is still relevant.

