PHP’s initial appeal was you could do scripting on the server side, “turn off PHP with a ?>” spit out normal html, and “turn back on PHP with a <?php”.
For a beginner programmer, it was simple, easy to understand, and had an include so your designs were’t nested table hairball messes of garbage. (but your CSS was definitely garbage).
Today, it’s so easy to run JavaScript, I can build a basic jsx site in under an hour, just like I can with PHP and includes. With Bun, I can quickly write a data access layer as well and wire up crud APIs w/ JWT auth. A weekend project in both.
I do get why JS appeals to people, but switching from PHP to JS feels a little winning an internet argument — you might feel smarter for doing so but in reality all you’ve done is sunk time into something that doesn’t make you any better off.
For PHP on the other hand - even when I started writing PHP3 - so certainly not the very beginnings, it's clearly just cobbling together whatever works from unrelated half-understood parts and so there's no coherent centre to it, when I last worked on some PHP earlier this year it still felt like bailing wire and string.
Equally, PHP3 is worlds apart from modern PHP.
Your point is a little like saying “motorbikes are easy to maintain because they’re based on the penny-farthing”. Times have changed and your references are literally decades out-of-date.
I don't really agree. I think the goal should be to reduce complexity where possible, but not if you're inevitably painting yourself into a corner.
If you want the simplest and most scalable way forward, write static pages and avoid server-side rendering.
Typescript exists, but if I'm compiling something I'm using a real language or framework like dotnet. There's no reason for me to use typescript and node and install 100 packages when I can just install dotnet.
While strongly typed languages are great. I like to be able to get things done. This is why I don’t C++ anymore. This is also why I don’t dotnet anymore. Too much BS with the type system and correctness and the Microsoft way or lack of support or rug pull. They lost me when they killed XNA.
Typescript is actually good, except for the fact that it’s a transpiler to JavaScript. That part sucks.
I want a C++, with Types, with memory safety, with garbage collection, with pointers, with a dev experience like dotnet, but we don’t have those things.
> I want a C++, with Types, with memory safety, with garbage collection, with pointers, with a dev experience like dotnet, but we don’t have those things.
Dotnet, you want dotnet. Dotnet has all of those. Yes it has pointers.
Unfortunately I can't think of anything constructive to say about this nonsense.
> Today, it’s so easy to run JavaScript, I can build a basic jsx site in under an hour, just like I can with PHP and includes.
You assume people agree that it's preferable to work in JavaScript.
The niche I think PHP had back in the day has largely been supplanted by Python.
Maybe it’s better now, but after moving on from it to basically anything else after a 25 year career, I don’t miss it.
At this point it's diverged from PHP to the point that it's basically a different language, is (IIRC) actually slower than PHP 8, and the HHVM doesn't even support PHP any more.
As such, it's not a huge surprise that relatively few people outside of Meta give it much attention.
I also moved on from PHP several years ago, and don't miss it. That doesn't mean I don't recognise that there are still perfectly legitimate reasons to choose it.
Because everyone is OK with PHP. I'm not even using it directly but most of the web runs on it.
