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PHP 8.5

(stitcher.io)
214 points brentroose | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.304s | source
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calpaterson ◴[] No.45989855[source]
A lot of people are too proud to be associated with PHP. I am ready to admit that know nothing about the language except that a lot of people make cool things with it.

My favourite PHP product at the moment is BookStack (https://www.bookstackapp.com/), a really good wiki. I run an instance for my family and it's great.

But there are loads of things. And I notice that many of the sites I like using...are built on well maintained PHP stacks.

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1. jjice ◴[] No.45992901[source]
Modern PHP is a damn fine, fast language. I wrote production PHP from 2021 to 2023. The problem with PHP wasn't the language or the ecosystem (PHP community packages are very solid in my experience), it's the existing PHP code you'll work with and the people that hire for PHP.

My salary literally doubled within two years of getting a gig that wasn't PHP. If you see a listing for PHP dev work, there's a good chance it's notably lower salary. There are still solid gigs for it, but I swear they lean lower.

The other problem is the existing codebases. There is some awful legacy PHP 4 era code. There are also a lot of practices that old PHP had that are just awful to work with, and there's a bit of variety in there. So many bad data access patterns out there. Many of old PHP codebases have their own spin on that kind of thing.

I understand this isn't actually due to the language, but there is a real correlation (in my experience) between old bad code and it being in PHP. Which is totally fair because it was a good tool to reach for to "get shit done (r)" and that code was successful enough to have to continue to live.

Modern PHP has, thanks to the core language and the big frameworks, made it wonderful. I lead a big push to go from PHP 5.8 to PHP 8.1 at the time at my last company. It was wonderful. The quality of the code we were enabled to write was huge.

If I was starting a new project today, I probably wouldn't reach for PHP, but I'd gladly join in on a modern (last ten years) Laravel project.