Many emotional language bashing comments here, and everything between „php is dead“ to „php is awesome now“.
Personally I liked that php has an ultra low entrance bar: shared hosting for $2, ftp deployment, no advanced syntax to understand. When starting work in teams instead of solo and coding nontrivial business rules, this ease of doing died for me. Moved on.
Many years of JavaScript, doing nodejs since 0.4, it was just like having superpowers and doing isomorphic things. Mixing things every other month with coffeescript, babel, typescript and trying a different framework for every new project. What once felt refreshing is now just exhausting and JS projects tends to end in rewrite loops.
Before/Inbetween/After there were many languages, from C at university, to C#, Ruby, Go, ... . Mostly the tech didn‘t change much, but over time emotions change for me. Longest streak of love had ruby, shortest had Go (just a few weeks before it became disgusting for me). I believe thats Personal and different for everyone.
After all my reflections I finally settled with just two choices of techstacks: Elixir/Phoenix for all things Web and Rust for everything else.
Writing highlevel businesscode , interactive exploration of things, CRUD things and realtime frontends in Phoenix is a breeze. But this ease of use has tradeoffs as always, I always feel that this dynamic code is somewhat „fluffy“, but ist seems that this is a key to prototype and ship things rapidly.
When i do want to do things that feel more „substantial“/„meaningful“ than just assembling yet another web product, I Switch to Rust. Producing a statically linked, crosscompiled binary that is „proven“ to work after discussing with the compiler is deeply satisfying for me. Unlike those „fluff“ / yet-another-web-product work.
Full Circle to PHP: awesome to see static typing available now! But this alone doesn’t make it feel so heavily baremetal for me, still fluffy with types bolted on. It is the fastest php ever, but still in the ballpark of scripting languages. It has mature, productive frameworks, but Phoenix feels superior and leading the way (next rails? Dunno), so why bother if php plays catch up to moving targets?
Software Development has become somewhat like fashion now, and PHP looks like those jeans jackets people had in east germany. Not inherently bad, fully functional for its purpose, but once you experience the taste of freedom in the western world you insist to have „real“ things. Best metaphor I can think of, but as stated: most discussions here are highly emotional, and it’s hard to put that in words.
Personally I liked that php has an ultra low entrance bar: shared hosting for $2, ftp deployment, no advanced syntax to understand. When starting work in teams instead of solo and coding nontrivial business rules, this ease of doing died for me. Moved on.
Many years of JavaScript, doing nodejs since 0.4, it was just like having superpowers and doing isomorphic things. Mixing things every other month with coffeescript, babel, typescript and trying a different framework for every new project. What once felt refreshing is now just exhausting and JS projects tends to end in rewrite loops.
Before/Inbetween/After there were many languages, from C at university, to C#, Ruby, Go, ... . Mostly the tech didn‘t change much, but over time emotions change for me. Longest streak of love had ruby, shortest had Go (just a few weeks before it became disgusting for me). I believe thats Personal and different for everyone.
After all my reflections I finally settled with just two choices of techstacks: Elixir/Phoenix for all things Web and Rust for everything else.
Writing highlevel businesscode , interactive exploration of things, CRUD things and realtime frontends in Phoenix is a breeze. But this ease of use has tradeoffs as always, I always feel that this dynamic code is somewhat „fluffy“, but ist seems that this is a key to prototype and ship things rapidly.
When i do want to do things that feel more „substantial“/„meaningful“ than just assembling yet another web product, I Switch to Rust. Producing a statically linked, crosscompiled binary that is „proven“ to work after discussing with the compiler is deeply satisfying for me. Unlike those „fluff“ / yet-another-web-product work.
Full Circle to PHP: awesome to see static typing available now! But this alone doesn’t make it feel so heavily baremetal for me, still fluffy with types bolted on. It is the fastest php ever, but still in the ballpark of scripting languages. It has mature, productive frameworks, but Phoenix feels superior and leading the way (next rails? Dunno), so why bother if php plays catch up to moving targets?
Software Development has become somewhat like fashion now, and PHP looks like those jeans jackets people had in east germany. Not inherently bad, fully functional for its purpose, but once you experience the taste of freedom in the western world you insist to have „real“ things. Best metaphor I can think of, but as stated: most discussions here are highly emotional, and it’s hard to put that in words.