I worked with PHP extensively for the first several years of my decade-long software engineering career. I was even on a team that won awards from PC Magazine and others for products that now have 10M+ downloads, doing everything from API development with PHP to building native Windows apps with XAML and a ton of other things. Having used almost every major language today in some kind of professional context, I can say with authority that PHP is the weakest language out of the entire bunch.
This article is more accurate than most people would ever like to admit. Here is a chart from Stack Overflow Trends showing a comparison of PHP vs Python in popularity from the first days of SO through Feb 2020:
This is why folks should learn how to do actual research before dismissing an idea (for example, instead of just talking about 40% of websites using WordPress, many of which are crap sites and blogs that nobody really uses anyway, go look at the actual language popularity stats and see for yourself).
I don’t care what the fanboys say. As an expert in the industry, I have known for years that PHP is a weak language with more problems than even JavaScript, and year after year newer and far superior languages and platforms rise up, such as Ruby, Go, Clojure, Dart, Rust, and many more.
WordPress is a piece of junk that uses almost zero well-known best practices or design patterns and is effectively laughed at by 99% of people who are actually experts in the industry and can code in more than one or two languages (many of them in 10 or more, as you should be able to do if you want to make comparisons. How the hell can you say PHP is so great if it’s all you know? Seriously!?)
It will always be somewhat popular because there will always be managers and entrepreneurs and other people with limited tech skills who are calling the shots and choosing things like PHP / WordPress. There is a way to use PHP correctly and Laravel is pretty nice, but these are the exceptions and most of the time people just produce absolute garbage full of comparison errors and SQL injection vulnerabilities and duplicate code everywhere.
Someone once called PHP “Perl for dummies” and I could not think of a better description than a dumbed-down version of another poorly designed language that has also fallen by the wayside. Good riddance.
