PHP in 2024

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

PHP’s “no build step” model and cheap shared hosting are praised as a uniquely low-friction way to learn web development and ship small sites, even in 2024. Commenters highlight how modern PHP—especially with frameworks like Laravel and Symfony—remains extremely productive for CRUD-style business apps, while others argue that its historical quirks, weak typing legacy, and ecosystem complexity make alternatives like Django, Rails, Go, or Node more attractive for new projects. There is broad agreement that PHP’s popularity is declining and that most serious use now happens through higher-level frameworks or CMSs rather than raw PHP, but many still see it as a powerful, underappreciated tool for fast, pragmatic web development.

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.