PHP in 2024

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

PHP’s “no build step” and accessibility

  • Many praise PHP’s historic advantage: edit a file, refresh the browser, no build or complex toolchain.
  • This made PHP highly accessible to beginners and “non‑elitist” — especially combined with dirt‑cheap shared hosting and FTP‑based deploys.
  • Some feel nothing modern matches the speed from idea → deployed site, especially with plain PHP + HTML (+ HTMX/SQLite).

Frameworks and perceived productivity

  • Laravel and Symfony are repeatedly cited as extremely productive ecosystems with rich tooling (queues, caching, jobs, asset bundling, admin UIs).
  • Some argue Laravel is “one step ahead” of Go/Ruby/Node/Python frameworks; others say Django/Rails are at least comparable or superior.
  • There is disagreement on scalability: some report Laravel becoming hard to maintain on larger projects, recommending Symfony instead.

Language design, typing, and legacy issues

  • Critics highlight PHP’s historical weak typing, inconsistencies, global state, and mixing of PHP/HTML/JS as major design flaws and security/maintainability risks.
  • Supporters counter that modern PHP (7/8) has strong typing features, better performance, and is “pretty much fine” compared to PHP 4/5.
  • There is debate over dynamic vs static typing; some see the old practice of type hints via comments as emblematic of past problems.

Comparisons with other languages

  • PHP is contrasted with Node/JS (complex build tooling, npm instability), Go (simple binaries, strong concurrency, but fewer libraries and rough edges), Java/Kotlin (enterprise‑grade but heavier), Python/Django, Ruby/Rails, Rust, etc.
  • Some claim developers who know more “advanced” languages tend to dislike PHP; others say this underestimates modern PHP and overestimates alternatives.

Deployment, tooling, and runtime model

  • PHP’s per‑request model (no long‑running app process) is seen as both a strength (no mutexes, trivial updates via git pull) and a limitation (poorer integrated debugging, global state patterns).
  • Discussion touches on Docker setups (php‑fpm + web server), Nginx Unit, FrankenPHP, Caddy, and VPS control panels.
  • Frontend build pipelines are often still done with Node; some experiment with PHP‑based SCSS/JS compilation at runtime.

Learning, onboarding, and popularity

  • PHP is seen as a good first language for learning web dev and basic OOP, though also full of “footguns” for novices.
  • Newcomers report confusion from modern stacks (Docker, Composer); others recommend starting with simple LAMP installs or WordPress hacking.
  • Metrics like TIOBE, Google Trends, and Stack Overflow indicate declining popularity, yet many still run successful, long‑lived PHP systems.