Yep, PHP is turning 30 this year! Wondering if "PHP is still relevant?" Ever since we have been hearing that PHP is dead. It was “dead” 10 years ago, 5 years ago, and “is dead” today. But somehow - it isn’t. Anyway... happy birthday!

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[–] darvit@lemmy.darvit.nl 42 points 2 months ago (12 children)

Everyone in this thread: PHP sucks because it was bad when I last used it 20 years ago.

[–] TheKingBee@lemmy.world 7 points 2 months ago (3 children)

I mean it does suck, but it sucks less than anything else we have.

[–] balsoft@lemmy.ml 13 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

PHP is far from "least bad language". Nowadays it is an ok language, one of many. You can also write ok code in it. The main issue is that it's really easy to write horrible shit that just barely works and will break when you look at it wrong. In fact without a lot of knowledge and experience that is the code you will probably write.

There are much better languages for any webdev niche you can think of, and some that are just better for webdev overall (e.g. Elixir). The reason PHP is still relevant is mostly huge legacy codebases that require a lot of engineering power to maintain (because PHP is not a good language for maintenance).

The way I look at it is that PHP is the C++ of webdev (but slightly worse).

[–] ICastFist@programming.dev 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Nah, i'd say java has been better than PHP overall

[–] InternetCitizen2@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

That's also 30 years old, old man!

[–] sukhmel@programming.dev 6 points 2 months ago

A language usually doesn't become worse with time, at least if the devs do a good job at improving it.

There are cases of new languages that looked better but didn't become mainstream because the ecosystem requires time to grow (and adoption, which creates a vicious cycle because adoption requires ecosystem to already be there)

[–] zalgotext@sh.itjust.works 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

IDK, I like Django/DRF

[–] PolarKraken@programming.dev 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

FastAPI ftw, fight me! Lol jk Django is cool and useful and serves a different need, quite well from what I understand.

[–] zalgotext@sh.itjust.works 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Lol I've used both, FastAPI is nice too! I think my ideal situation would be FastAPI's endpoints/routing, combined with Django's ORM and DRF's automagic serializers/viewsets.

[–] richieadler@programming.dev 1 points 2 months ago

You may like Django Ninja with a dash of FastAPI-HTMX or Fasthx.

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