PHP: The Toyota Corolla of programming

Car Analogies & Language Comparisons

• Many argue Java is closer to the Corolla/Honda Civic/F-150: boring, ubiquitous, conservative, but robust.
• PHP is compared instead to Hyundai Elantra, Trabant, Ford Escort, Nissan – initially cheap/derided, now improved yet still not “well‑engineered” in many eyes.
• Side debates spin off to “what car is Python/Go/Clojure,” revealing that “Corolla” is being used to mean different things: reliability vs boredom vs ubiquity.

PHP’s Past Reputation vs Modern Reality

• Several recall early PHP as a “fractal of bad design”: chaotic APIs, security pitfalls, spaghetti inline HTML.
• Others stress modern PHP (7/8) is substantially different: types, better error handling, big performance gains, frameworks that hide footguns.
• Some insist critiques are frozen in 2005; others say they still have unresolved design grievances, even if they don’t spell them out.

Security, Stability, and Reliability

• One commenter reports frequent segfaults and hacks in recent years; multiple others counter that segfaults are extremely rare in production PHP and likely due to bad extensions or code.
• Disagreement over whether mid‑2000s hacks were mainly PHP’s fault or terrible app code.
• PHP’s non‑semver changes in point releases are criticized, but others say change logs make upgrades manageable.

Deployment Model & Shared‑Nothing Architecture

• Major pro‑PHP theme: historically trivial deployment (FTP to shared hosting; no build step) was decisive for its success.
• The shared‑nothing per‑request model is praised for preventing in‑memory state bugs that plague long‑running servers.
• Critics argue “easy deploy” is overstated once you care about atomic updates, blue‑green deploys, and reproducible builds.

Ecosystem: Frameworks, CMS, and Jobs

• WordPress and other PHP CMSs are credited with cementing PHP’s dominance; hosting ecosystems followed.
• Laravel and Symfony are repeatedly cited as making PHP pleasant and highly productive; Laravel in particular is likened to Rails.
• Some note PHP jobs have been plentiful and stable for decades, especially around content sites and CMS work.

Greenfield Use in 2025 & Alternatives

• Skeptics say the article fails to justify choosing PHP for new projects when modern stacks (TypeScript, Go, JVM, Python/Rails‑like frameworks) exist.
• Supporters argue PHP+Laravel remains one of the fastest ways to ship CRUD/web apps, though even they might hesitate to use “bare PHP.”
• TypeScript on both client and server is seen by some as the new “good enough” default; others point to backend performance, ecosystem maturity, and deployment simplicity in favor of compiled or JVM languages.

Perception and Bias

• A few note that HN PHP debates often revolve around outdated experiences and that this likely mirrors how shallow much language discourse is in general.