[lordgroff]

> For a "dead" language, PHP sure seems to have a lot of life left in it!

I honestly have not met, in real life, anyone that has thought PHP is dead. People that hated PHP? Oh yeah, I've met plenty of such people, often from using it in anger in pre-7+ days. And, (to be fair) for a language nerd, even new PHP is not exactly an exciting language. It's productive, but so very far from glamorous.

But dead? How can it be? Wordpress is an absolute behemoth. Laravel is large. Symphony finds plenty of use in the biggishOrg space. Even Drupal is not dead. Who in their right mind could think it's dead?

[spiderfarmer]

The people who hated PHP created the gargantuan JS ecosystem and are still switching tooling and frameworks every 6 months.

[kstrauser]

*Some people. I despised older versions from my time dealing with it (during the upgrade from PHP2 to 3), and I never wrote non-trivial amounts of JS until the last year or so. PHP has a broad base of anti-support.

BTW, my loathing of earlier versions don't carry through to now. I haven't had to look at it in a couple decades and maybe it's better now. I was strongly in the hater camp, based on my own personal experiences with it, around the time JS was starting to become a thing.

[paxys]

It's also true that this forum and the startup ecosystem in general doesn't represent the reality of global software development. Saying "PHP is dead" is accurate if your entire world is silicon valley.

[wongarsu]

"PHP is dead" in the sense that your startup is likely dead if you tell potential investors that you use PHP. Outside the startup world incentives are a bit different