This is something you only begin to appreciate if you've been through a couple of economic recessions. Not everybody has money and manpower to keep their website up to date every other month! A well-built app for a typical business should be able to coast along through the lifetime of, say, an Ubuntu LTS release without much effort.
That blog post is long, but definitely not rambling, and unlike the above quote, is done in good faith. PHP night have improved, but if it has it will likely have used that blog post as a reference.
The best I found: it was up three days ago; unclear when it happened within the last ~70 hours.
Java, Ruby, C#, etc are application servers and this massively complicates everything.
I have heard a lot of praise for both laravel and php and I still reserve judgement, but since trying it out I take all the performance claims one way or another with 100% my daily recommended intake of salt.
Modern java on a recent jvm (>=17) is incredibly scalable in comparison.
However.
I've spent many years doing PHP and Java-based development. Often times in parallel, having PHP projects on the side and earning money in Java development.
At some point, I had a stint of several years doing exclusively PHP-based work.
Every single time, my PHP projects were serving orders of magnitude more people orders of magnitude cheaper than Java-based projects.
And when I say "orders of magnitude", it is not an exaggeration but sad truth.
I am now in the Java land again, because pay is better. My current project has already burnt several millions serving 20 secretaries that handle 1000 individual cases each year.
My mind is with the PHP project I sold several years ago when it was serving 120,000 people at the cost of a few hundred euros per year + my labor, which was essentially free, but if I could slap my usual daily rate on it, it would still be somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000€/year.
PHP has its warts, but it also has uses and it is often still my go-to language when developing for web. That is, when I do not go for OpenResty (Lua) or Elixir (Phoenix). Sometimes what I really want is PHP.
Also, since we're on the topic, I notice that the article also boosts it specifically as an advantage in scaling php ("Fathom's case shows that you can [scale] very effectively with an arsenal of tooling that comes from Laravel.").
This is a surprise to me. Why would the scaling capability come from a framework (generally a collection of code that's essentially executed from within the runtime)? I would expect performance scaling to come from runtime extensions or parameter tweaking or alternate runtimes.
"PHP is Legacy, in 2024"
This is an exception that calls to be editorialized. The original title is as-if a quote, which the original writers omitted to mark as such.
