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Poor PHP. It just keeps getting dumped on.



And rightly so. Frankly, I think the only reason PHP keeps floating on is the inertia it has. All the investment in tools, existing codebase and developer experience are what keep it going, not language merits.

And yes, this means, that whatever you invest in, be ready to abandon it and move forward, preferrably sooner rather than later. After all, langauges are nothing but tools. Don't take them personally.


>And rightly so. Frankly, I think the only reason PHP keeps floating on is the inertia it has. All the investment in tools, existing codebase and developer experience are what keep it going, not language merits.

Considering the alternatives PHP is not bad at all. It's not like Python or Ruby are some pinnacle of language design.

It's main BS is a polluted default namespace, incosistent function naming, and a few semantic inconsistencies. It's not like any other language doesn't have its share of BS.

Plus what it lacks (a proper AST etc) it's getting. It has been improving ever since 5.0, and fast. Including getting a vast speed increase with 7 that will leave Python and co in the dust.


Besides that list-dict array implementation, it really hasn't much left going for it.


Well, it has closures, interfaces, dead easy reflection, traits, namespaces, etc etc, speaks to tons of systems, includes tons of batteries, has a great dependency manager, is dead easy to deploy, has a huge ecosystem and good tooling, etc.


My impression is that most of those who badmouth PHP never bothered to find out what has changed since 4.x days.




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