I have read the recent news that Windows is ending the support of PHP builds with mixed feelings. On one hand, I think it makes sense moving forward to the direction of new languages. On the other hand, it makes me a bit sad. I know most probably the community will still support PHP-Windows builds, however, in this decade there are still companies launching new businesses using PHP and I see that as a good thing.
I see companies very proud of using fancy baby-boomer technologies such as Go, Clojure, Elixir, etc, but that is not necessarily a good thing. I am not against using new technologies, Luddism is a disease. However, they are not a silver bullet and they are not going to magically create very stable, resilient, performant, testable products in terms of tech just because they are modern.
I have seen some companies succeeding in the last 5 years using:(dramatic pause) PHP. Yes, PHP. I am not a PHP fanboy, but I admire people using it to build really great products nowadays. They started with the technology they knew, they ignored all the internet bullshit and stick with the language they had the knowledge in order to design a good product. They were pragmatic.
The idea of starting a new startup today using PHP as the main backend technology would sound crazy to most of the developers, but it is still happening. As I said before, I do not see any problem with it. I would get more surprised by people starting new projects with Go or Elixir without having any prior real-life experience.
Years are still passing and I still see people overlooking basic concepts such as all sorts of tests, solid principles, documentation, clean code, etc. The new technologies are not helping you out if you do not understand those basic principles.
There are some exceptions obviously and in some cases, a specific technology would be better suitable rather than the other one. Considering the common cases though, stick with the one you can deliver more business value. It will be useless having a type-safe, thread-safe, whatever fancy stuff if you cannot leverage the benefits or the software you are designing does not require such a thing.
Long-life to PHP and long-life to pragmatic developers.
Top comments (2)
Hi Guilherme, I didn't see the news in that way. I think Microsoft dropping the support for Windows PHP builds more like a move in favor of WSL2. As for deployments I don't have any data on it, but I guess most deployments are already on Linux Servers.
But I agree that any language/tool can deliver a great project if used in the right way and that the concepts pointed by you are by far more important that the tool people are using to build things.
Yes, you are right. Most of the servers are running over Linux, I saw the news as a milestone in the history of the language.