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Discussion on: Underestimated PHP

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Alain D'Ettorre

PHP is not dying, but it's massively shrinking. It survives today because of these 4 reasons and 4 reasons only for me:

  • WordPress is everywhere, good luck maintaining that code
  • Laravel
  • Cheap costs, deploys and developers
  • Huge amount of third-party libraries and code to maintain

However I'd never choose it for anything relevant these days because it falls short on things like serverless, WASM, compilation, anything outside web development and even testing and standard library are a bit loose. Sure it got better and will pay bills for another decade at least, I've used and appreciated the language, but it's not where the market is going.

JavaScript is much better in terms of integration and ecosystem despite not being as fast, Go is superior in anything except for adoption for now, I don't like Python but still it has very good traction, big third-party registry and does wonders on serverless as well as in any other field except for web development, then there are Java and C# which are both evolving, has massive enterprise support and will surely last longer because of that.

PHP is not dying, but I wouldn't bet on it