PHP is great for people that know it and are productive in it. For legacy codebases and software.
Newcomers should learn to use something else. Go, Ruby, Python, Node, Nim. The tools are better, more modern, with broader library support, and you can use the languages in more ways throughout your career.
I am not sure I would start a side project in PHP, but I will disagree that the other languages have better tools or libraries. For doing your job most of the time the language is not the issue, real work in my case is mostly related to thinking at teh problem, researching and implementing solutions, PHP allows me to write solutions and when the right tool for the job is a CLI tool (like ffmpeg or ghostscript) I can use it from PHP, if a bash script can dsolve a problem I write the solution in bash and use it from PHP, and I had a problem where Python was pefect, we made the Python solution and integrated the mainPHp app with it.
A good developer will not be an extremist fanboy for a language or framework, otherwise he will reinvent stuff in his cool tech because he does not want to learn.
But I agree for someone new start with JavaScript, but if someone will pay you to work with PHP take the money, learn modern PHP, use a good IDE and you will be happy.
Which is why I favor Python so much. You can literally do anything with it since it is in every field: finance, data science, AI, API, SSR and thanks to transpilers and efforts to bring python to the browser, frontend is now possible.
Today we build frontend in Javascript. Tomorrow we shall build them ALL in Python. Backend AND frontend!
I agree with you on portability. If that's a concern, and you're a web developer, I'd say TypeScript is a more obvious choice than Go, Ruby, etc.
Re: "tools are better, more modern, with broader library support" - I would need a lot of evidence to convince me this is the case, particularly for Ruby and Python.
I would need a lot of evidence to convince me this is the case, particularly for Ruby and Python.
Both Django (python) and Rails (ruby) are great, popular and well supported environments with very "broad library support". This is a bizarre statement.
So your defense of broader library support is that each of them have one framework to choose, where php has dozens of web frameworks, all of which have broad library support (often sharing libraries between them)
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PHP is great for people that know it and are productive in it. For legacy codebases and software.
Newcomers should learn to use something else. Go, Ruby, Python, Node, Nim. The tools are better, more modern, with broader library support, and you can use the languages in more ways throughout your career.
I have tried many of them, I find the library depth and tooling to be much better in PHP, at least if you are developing server side web code.
People that talk about PHP not being modern normally also stopped looking at PHP around PHP4....
I am not sure I would start a side project in PHP, but I will disagree that the other languages have better tools or libraries. For doing your job most of the time the language is not the issue, real work in my case is mostly related to thinking at teh problem, researching and implementing solutions, PHP allows me to write solutions and when the right tool for the job is a CLI tool (like ffmpeg or ghostscript) I can use it from PHP, if a bash script can dsolve a problem I write the solution in bash and use it from PHP, and I had a problem where Python was pefect, we made the Python solution and integrated the mainPHp app with it.
A good developer will not be an extremist fanboy for a language or framework, otherwise he will reinvent stuff in his cool tech because he does not want to learn.
But I agree for someone new start with JavaScript, but if someone will pay you to work with PHP take the money, learn modern PHP, use a good IDE and you will be happy.
It depends. For web projects it’s still one of the best choices.
Making a Website with Go would be hell, but for network and api stuff it’s a good choice.
The right tool for the right problem.
Which is why I favor Python so much. You can literally do anything with it since it is in every field: finance, data science, AI, API, SSR and thanks to transpilers and efforts to bring python to the browser, frontend is now possible.
Today we build frontend in Javascript. Tomorrow we shall build them ALL in Python. Backend AND frontend!
I agree with you on portability. If that's a concern, and you're a web developer, I'd say TypeScript is a more obvious choice than Go, Ruby, etc.
Re: "tools are better, more modern, with broader library support" - I would need a lot of evidence to convince me this is the case, particularly for Ruby and Python.
Both Django (python) and Rails (ruby) are great, popular and well supported environments with very "broad library support". This is a bizarre statement.
So your defense of broader library support is that each of them have one framework to choose, where php has dozens of web frameworks, all of which have broad library support (often sharing libraries between them)
Why is that evidence that they are _better_ than PHP's ecosystem? That's the claim I'm skeptical of.
I just found it weird that you singled out the two languages that are the basis for two of the most popular web development frameworks.