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I still love PHP and JavaScript (2022)

(the.scapegoat.dev)
123 points jonfelsar | 3 comments | 09 Sep 25 20:09 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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ksenzee ◴[09 Sep 25 20:29 UTC] No.45188438[source]▶
This is a preemptive plea for people who last wrote PHP in 2012 not to opine on what writing PHP is like in 2025. It is not a hammer with two claws. It’s a modern language with types and tooling and package management.
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1. jjice ◴[09 Sep 25 20:52 UTC] No.45188884[source]▶
PHP got a lot better. Their types are actually awesome and better than average. The problems are now about the developers more than the language. Legacy PHP is the majority of PHP and it'll still make you go insane since you'll have to deal with that awful, ugly code someone wrote in the Summer of 2004 when they were an intern that is now core to a business. The people that have been writing PHP and only PHP for two decades also don't usually have great patterns they follow, so when you step into their code base, there's hell to experience.

Had this at my last job where I wrote PHP full time for two years. There were so many bugs caused by things that PHP has since remedied. I updated everything we could and it was huge step up (the available linting and static analysis tools are very solid), but there's still some deep, dark legacy code there that no one wanted to touch. Hell, a good part of my problem with that code base was actually because of Apache and mod_php.

If you have a fresh PHP code base, it's not that bad anymore. It wouldn't be my first pick, but definitely not my last.

Edit: I never got to work with Laravel, but I've played around independently and read their docs and it seems like a good dev experience.

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2. ksenzee ◴[09 Sep 25 20:54 UTC] No.45188936[source]▶
The developers come in all flavors, too. I spend my time writing Drupal code and the average quality is fairly high. (Code quality in the Drupal project itself has always been high, in fact, even when PHP was a disaster on wheels.) So it depends on what those people writing PHP for two decades have been working on.
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3. jjice ◴[09 Sep 25 21:02 UTC] No.45189074[source]▶
Absolutely true - I can't group all of any kind of dev together