[mrrsm]

PHP, since version 7.0, has been a much improved language since when many people started hating on it. They have been consistently moving the spec forward and making improvements. It's not perfect, but no language really is after all. It is really nice just seeing issues that have been around for a long time being addressed and fixed.

[rglullis]

I have to confess that I have a lot of prejudice against PHP after having to work with it at the time of PHP3 and 4. It seemed like even worse than Perl in the sense of how many things were just bolted on it as a way that the developers could claim "yeah, you can do that with PHP". After having a blog running wordpress hacked twice by mere virtue of being online, I dismissed it for good.

I keep hearing about how the language has improved, but to me it feels like even if the language gets rid of all its heaps of crap, it still is in a evolutionary dead-end. Is there anything that PHP is developing or adopting that can not be had at other established languages?

(Edit: I never had something downvoted so fast before. This is not concern trolling. I seriously would like to know if it makes sense for a non-PHP developer to look into it)

[CiPHPerCoder]

> Is there anything that PHP is developing or adopting that can not be had at other established languages?

Modern cryptography is baked in since 7.2.

https://libsodium.gitbook.io/doc/bindings_for_other_language...

Most of the people who shit on PHP have a lot of love for other languages. A survey of the cryptography features the "favored" languages offer will almost certainly fall into two camps:

1. "We wrap OpenSSL"

2. "Go compile it yourself" (i.e. there is nothing baked in)

There's a lot of badness with OpenSSL's API design, especially with asymmetric cryptography. For a fun exercise in these languages, try encrypting with RSA with OAEP padding, but without using SHA1 as your hash function.

For completeness, PHP is one of the languages that wraps OpenSSL too! But it also wraps libsodium, and the community has been moving towards libsodium (unless they need something from OpenSSL for the sake of backwards compatibility) since early in the 7.x series.

If you're going to provide cryptography features in your language, but you aren't shipping modern cryptography in your standard library, you're underperforming what PHP has offered for years at this point. The easiest way to meet the standard that PHP 7.2+ establishes is to add libsodium to your language's standard library.

(There are salient arguments for "why even provide a cryptography feature as part of the language at all?" but most of the languages that see real world deployment are already doing that.)

[smt88]

> after having to work with it at the time of PHP3 and 4

PHP 5 was released 16 years ago and was a massive evolution of the language. The same is true for PHP 5.2, 5.3, and 7. It's safe to say that your conclusions about the language are no longer accurate.

> Is there anything that PHP is developing or adopting that can not be had at other established languages?

No. I can't think of any reason to start a new project with PHP today. All of its best features are things that have been available in other languages for years. It's also not particularly popular outside of WordPress.

[kamel3d]

I don't know how can you blame the hacking of your website on the language rather than your admin skills, there infinite number of websites built in PHP and never got hacked!

[skrebbel]

By the way you phrase that question, you're dismissing that single key feature that PHP _already has_ that cannot be had at other established languages.

I know of no other language that lets you deploy a web app by dragging some files from the left to the right in FileZilla. No setup, No vendor lock in, no nothing. It just works.

Cross-cloud serverless frameworks that wrap AWS lambda + competitors get you somewhat close in other languages, but you still have a lot more setup to go through, and lot fewer hosting providers to choose from.

PHP's deployment and execution models really set it apart.

[muglug]

> Is there anything that PHP is developing or adopting that can not be had at other established languages?

No, not really, but it's still very good for casual web development, which makes up the lion's share of all backend code being written today.

Languages don't need to evolve a ton to be popular – just look at Python, which is doing very well despite not having had a ton of radical changes.

[ragnese]

> Is there anything that PHP is developing or adopting that can not be had at other established languages?

IMO, no. The language is still near the bottom for both dynamic and "static" typed languages. HOWEVER, if you're doing web backend stuff, Laravel and Symfony are both really solid frameworks.

The direction PHP Is moving in right now is to emulate Java 7, but without generics or concurrency. It's definitely a dead-end unless they come up with something pretty novel and change direction (again).

[dktp]

> Is there anything that PHP is developing or adopting that can not be had at other established languages?

I think for the vast majority of projects, this is not a question you'll be asking yourself when picking the language.

I think PHP is one of the best languages to pick when you want a quick MVP for an online service (one that doesn't require specific things PHP is not good at). The community is one of the largest, there are more developers than nearly any other backend language and Laravel is probably the most complete all-in-one backend framework out there.

So the question is often, is PHP good enough to develop a maintainable app with decent performance, where developers won't hate every minute spent on it. And the answer is pretty much yes with PHP 7+

[open-source-ux]

"Is there anything that PHP is developing or adopting that can not be had at other established languages?"

One thing that PHP does better than any other language for web development is ease of deployment. It isn't really anything inherent in the language that makes it easier to deploy, it's simply that hundreds, probably thousands of web hosts have made deployment easy for PHP. Also, the PHP community has documented deployment and installation scenarios thoroughly.

Deployment might sound like a small piece in the overall picture of building a web app but it is actually hugely important. If you want your users to self-install your web app, or to give them the widest possibly choice of deployment hosts, then PHP beats every other language by a mile.

I always mention this quote from blogger and programmer Jeff Attwood on this topic of depolyment:

"If you want to produce free-as-in-whatever code that runs on virtually every server in the world with zero friction or configuration hassles, PHP is damn near your only option." [1]

Guess when he wrote it? 2012.

Sure, we've got VPS and even more hosting options, but in 2020 what other languages can match or even surpass PHP's ease of deployment? Can you give instructions to your relatively non-tech users and tell them how to successful deploy your web app with the same ease as PHP?

[1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-php-singularity/

[jasonlotito]

> Is there anything that PHP is developing or adopting that can not be had at other established languages?

I feel like I can ask that question about most established languages and get the same answer back. It still has the easiest deployment and development flow of any language I've ever used. I don't know of a single language that does that right now, and makes going from 0 to 100% much easier, which for smaller pet projects, it's so much less hassle. Upload file, it's running on the web. That's it.

As for all the features it has that other languages have, PHP tends to merge them together. While this means the language is larger than most, it also means I can do things in ways I want to and try new features out.

This doesn't mean I'm not using JS or Go or Java or other languages. But if I'm building a web API, PHP is the one that gets out of my way and lets me build it quickly and easily.

[alganet]

> Is there anything that PHP is developing or adopting that can not be had at other established languages?

Good documentation and reasonable backwards compatibility.

[RussianCow]

> Is there anything that PHP is developing or adopting that can not be had at other established languages?

Probably not, but that's the wrong question. The real question is: If you already know PHP, is there enough incentive/benefit to switching languages? Based on the experience of PHP devs I know (I personally haven't used it in years), the answer is "no" for many (most?) web dev cases.

[Lazare]

> Is there anything that PHP is developing or adopting that can not be had at other established languages?

I would say no, but of course, the same is true of most other established languages. What's interesting about PHP is that it's shifting from being a dumpster fire that you would never pick over a real language like Python/Ruby/node/Java/whatever, to one that's honestly broadly comparable for many tasks.

Is it innovating or doing anything really unique? Well, no, but you don't tend to find much innovation or unique features in any of those languages (these days, anyhow). At best they copy them (eventually) from the innovative languages. :)

> I seriously would like to know if it makes sense for a non-PHP developer to look into it

No more or less so than any other big, mainstream, relatively popular language. Learn it because you need it for a job, or because you'd like to see how another language ecosystem solves common problems. Don't learn it thinking you're going to see anything especially new.

[stanmancan]

As a gross oversimplification, I would say that the vast majority of languages share the same core functionality, then there's a little sliver that sets them apart from others and makes them unique. I would probably say that what sets PHP apart is it's easy. It's easy to install, use, develop with it, deploy, find hosts that support it, and get help from the community.

It's a decent language and with frameworks like Laravel you can quickly build reliable CRUD apps, which is the vast majority of websites and development.

[beberlei]

PHP has sort of done serverless in 2000, so evolutionary dead end is a a bit harsh :)