Really happy to be working with it again, even if on the side for now.
Developer speed does not get enough coverage when comparing languages.
When I work with a Node project it's such a slow dragging build process.
Using PHP is like a fun superpower that lets me turn out things on timescales that are borderline miraculous to clients and management.
I can hire a top-notch PHP engineer for half of what a mid-level JS engineer would be asking.
It's not that PHP engineers are less qualified than JS. I think bootcamps shifted the market for JS developers and now really good engineers cost an arm and a leg while good junior engineers start around the $100k mark. The whole JS salary market is insane and as a startup, I can't afford it right now.
Just pay what good engineers should be paid. If there are PHP developers out there not getting the same salary as a their peers like this post mentions, you should leave that job for a better one. Please demand better, PHP developers, for all of our sakes. Business always wants to put downward pressure on salary and we need to be united against this regardless of preferred tech stacks
It’s exactly 180 degrees for me. Node js just seems to be super fast. And with typescript its heavenly.
I don't make a website and working on node js is fun. In PHP it is like doing something esoteric. Just a simple argument parsing is so hard in php compared to node js. In nodejs I use meow and even without docs, I can parse cli easily. In fact, I think Rust can be more easier than PHP in many cases. I usually rewrite in rust for long term daemons. Also in php I need to install php I don't know why I should install php-pdo etc. I mean why not just allow composer etc to handle like just like node do? I am frustrated with php stdlib which seems to be fossil at the moment.
The thing I like about PHP is laravel framework where I can set up websites instantly. Node js is fragmented with adonis and many other micro-framework.
With Drupal, the code quality of the core is generally okay, however the added inertia may come from a "square peg, round hole" situation, where the CMS is being used for an obscure purpose for which it wasn't really designed. This is quite common in the wild, probably due to the low barrier to entry and the fact that people will use what they are comfortable with to solve every problem under the sun (not dissimilar to the prevalence of Excel throughout the world of finance for a variety of completely inappropriate use cases).
