I'm interested in your opinions about PHP

Just tell them you you enjoy a challenge and then roll your eyes back at them. And wear one of these: https://laracasts.com/shop/items/absent-minded-elephant-shirt

PHP has had a bad name for awhile as a small procedural language for noobs to build a small blog.

Honestly (course take it with a grain of salt) the way I look at it 1) respect is earned, rolling your eyes and making trollish comment... Talk later

1. People are bandwagon by default it seems and as such they build self worth by "mine is bigger then yours". Close their minds etc.. Ain't got time for that 3) people who don't look things over or go off hear-say, how do they form an opinion? Once again, talk later.

If Java Technologies hosting was as economical as PHP Apache I would tuck my tail and run back to Java Technologies but I am not in a situation where I can do that I maintain a site for a non-profit and I'm pretty well much had to stick with PHP for this project. But Java Technologies are much more Broad and mature and have much longer backwards compatibility so if you're looking for a real professional career and young and still starting out tuck your tail and run to Java Technologies. And of course that's just my opinion but look what Java programmers make and they are usually in a professional atmosphere. Back in the day I mainly used servlets, jsp, and of course classes. I didn't use any framework like spring. I did not have to set up the Tomcat server we had that done it is a chore in itself. Edit: of course it's been 12 years or more since I used any Java technology. I will add PHP has come a long way in the past few years but they're backwards compatibility and end-of-life thing is rotten. 7 to 10 years on a life cycle would be so much better. Of course some people would argue that but also funny the Java technology has good backwards compatibility like that kind of funny. If some of the major framework Developers say hey PHP let's have a little longer backwards compatibility maybe it would happen.

At this point I've started using languages for what they're strongest at. Learning other languages is really good for this - you get a broader view of programming and general, and learn when/how to use languages that best fit your problem.

For example:

• I'd use PHP for Laravel (CRUD app stuff),
• NodeJS for async stuff (think websockets, stuff that IS NOT web app crud)
• Python for workers (anything can work here, but I like some of Python's stuff, such as Celery, for consuming queue jobs)
• Golang for some tooling (perhaps connecting to a web server over IMAP and parsing mail, or calling mysqldump and processing the output in some way)

I guess it boils down to the best way to spend my time solving an issue. None even one iota of my consideration is about whether a language is "better" than another.

I have a couple friends with Java backgrounds--both very senior. One constantly nags me about doing PHP and tells me to get out before it completely dies. A couple years ago he was telling me to use Scala, then Grails and now Python. Seriously, make up your mind already. The other keeps an open mind and enjoys discussing how we solve problems with our chosen tool sets.

I wouldn't worry too much about other people's opinions. I've been on both the business and development side of the game forever. What matters most is that you enjoy what you do, get things done and get paid well for doing it. Probably in that order too.

As far as defending your choice of language, framework, etc, just let them know they'd be well-served by having another look at modern PHP and that you really enjoy using it. For those with an open mind, that should be enough. For the others, well then we're back to a childish "religious" debate and you'll never get anywhere with them so don't bother pressing on.

I think the best description of PHP I've heard was "It's good enough" :-)

PHP has a lot of baggage from the late 90's/early 2000's where it was the lowest common denominator, so language snobs and bores point and sneer while re-writing their whole stack in the new shiny (I mean - how dare a language be easy and accessible! Yuk!). Really, it's fine - and getting better at quite a rapid pace. It has it's quirks and oddnesses - but so do we all ;-)

I think, off the top of my head, I've programmed decent sized programs in Basic (many flavours), raw assembler, C/C++, Forth, Fortran, Pascal (various flavours), Ada, Perl, Java, Python, Ruby, Go, JS/Node, Cobol, PHP, and probably others I've now thankfully erased from memory - and tinkered with a whole load more ;-) They're all fine (well, apart from Forth - that did my head in ;-).

I sometimes wonder about programming language snobs - do they wander about saying "You speak Danish! :: eyeroll ::" "OMG, people still use Spanish omglol!". It's very odd.

Edit: just had to go look up Forth on wikipedia to remind myself. I'm now having 'nam style flashbacks :-/

PHP:
function floor5($v) {
  return ($v < 6) ? 5 : ($v - 1);
}

Forth:
: FLOOR5 ( n -- n' )   DUP 6 < IF DROP 5 ELSE 1 - THEN ;

:'-/

Programming is solving problems, and for web technology php is doing good job in solving problems...

It kinda makes me think about this Jeffrey retweeted

You aren't clever when you tell me "but PHP sucks". What sucks is your attitude.

Programmers saying this are probably not very good at what they are doing. If one can't see php evolved well he lives in a bubble.

Echoing @ohffs - lots of people have said that Ruby can be slow, allows monkey patching (often seeing as a hideous anti-pattern) and has far more methods than people can remember of believe is practical.

I recommend reading DHH's post on Ruby. https://m.signalvnoise.com/ruby-has-been-fast-enough-for-13-years-afff4a54abc7#.z7f7vlbu5 FTA: "Ruby is a luxury in the most egalitarian sense possible. It’s a luxury that the 99% can afford, but the 1% might struggle with. What a wonderful inversion of tradition!"

I recently listened to a podcast (can't find the link now...) where a guy was talking about the programming competitions he had entered. He had learned 100 programming languages (yes HUNDRED) languages. An example question (e.g. Optimising flight redirections due to weather issues) might require 3 hours to solve, he would spend 2 hours thinking about the problem, the approach and what language would be best. Then, after structuring the solution in his mind, would take 1 hour to write the code. That is a powerful programmer - not somebody who is biased to one language.

Laravel allows me to get CRUD apps built up fast and with minimal fuss. 90% of what I need is there. The rest I can source through Composer packages. I see PHP regaining the ground recently: PHP7 near-as-enough matching HHVM on speed, better language design decision making, it all helps...

...now if the functions could be named consistently, that would really make it awesome!

Thanks for all your replies so far ;) very interesting stuff.

Every time I'm going to attend conferences or join dev groups and people are talking about what they are doing, the holy question about your programming language pops out. Yeah guys, I'm doing PHP. And what happens next is the same thing, most of the time. People are rolling eyes and start smiling like they do on a little child who does anything sweet or something :D. The most responded answer I get is: "Oh ... PHP .. hm ... so your doing small things all the time?!?!" and the next one is: "Oh shit dude, this is so inconsistent and slow, it even doesn't know about OOP".

You can always joke about it and say something like: Yeah man, we work with that Wordpress thing, you know, where globals are everywhere and the code is a mess, can't even find anything when I am looking for something. Anyway, .... and move on to a different topic, don't wait for their response.

I think that for the most part, this is just hipster-like desire to be 'out of mainstream', be different, not be a part of the 'crowd', stand out. Which wouldn't be bad IF people didn't choose to be different just for the sake of being different, regardless of how effective or useful or logical that might or might not be.

Like, I have a couple of friends who will go to great lengths just to not write anything in PHP, even though they are experienced with it. Hell, they'll waste time and will choose something 'fancier' even though it's not even better than PHP for this given task. I suppose, this psychology is then often scaled to corporate level.

I dunno, I'm coding in PHP since 3.0 and 1998ish or something and I'm pretty happy with it, combined with various frameworks it had never failed me in what I needed to accomplish. Of course, there are specific tasks that other languages may be better tailored to and in that case I'd at least consider using them, but for most of my web development server side work PHP was, is and I suspect, will be doing just fine, and it's getting better and better.

According to various sources and based on whether you include CMS or not, PHP is used in 55 to 85% of all website backends in the world and there are reasons for that well beyond its supposed ease to learn or accessibility.

@jlrdw for what it's worth, you could just as easily/inexpensively set up a java hosting environment as you could one for php, ruby, python, etc.. on digitalocean, rackspace, amazon, linode, etc.. certainly shared hosting is not as cheap or easy to come by, but a VPS is a VPS.. set it up however you want. ;) So if you really wanted to use java, the only thing stopping you is probably you. :D

The only other thing I'll add is re: backward compatibility. It's not always a good thing to include. Sure it can make upgrades more involved, but not having to worry about backward compatibility means you can drop a lot of excess baggage and keep things lean and more performant. PHP 7 is wildly more performant than php 5.x and even beats HHVM in terms of speed & memory usage in many cases.

@willvincent thanks for the feedback but like I said I'm semi-retired and maintain a non-profit site and that will have to be PHP I have no control over it. But I have been doing PHP for several years also, and I am comfortable with it I just don't like how fast everything seems to change. I fully understand security enhancements but some of the frills and what not I don't want. I see you have also programmed VBA behind Microsoft Access and really that has not changed that much. Even the newer versions you could still use the dao 3.6 Library.

If you don't like how fast things change in PHP, you definitely don't want to build things in javascript.. :D