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0 pointsindymike4y ago0 comments

> From what I have seen, older people in our trade seem to recommend against PHP due to it having a terrible relationship with consistency, functionality, performance,

As an older person in the trade, I don't agree with the other older persons. Only consistency is a problem with PHP code, and that is largely NOT caused by PHP. Inconsistency is the product of developers coding without any real thought about how to abstract things (ok, well, maybe not in the case of magic strings). You can do this with every language. Some languages do everything possible to force consistency, and developer still find a way to be delightfully inconsistent even with the syntactic equivilent of bowling gutter bumpers (see Cobol, Go, Java). Consistency is a developer problem. You can write great code in languages that are terrible.

PHP has never been slow (compared to other dynamic languages), or lacked functionality. If there is a rub on PHP it comes from no separation of code and presentation, which flew in the face of the MVC pattern which was THE WAY for a very long time. Now... well, JSX much? Anyhow, my team works with Go, JS, PHP and Python, and the code that takes the least effort to both extend and maintain is... the PHP.

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ManuelKiessling4y ago

I am honestly and truly trying my absolute best, but no matter how hard I try, I again and again completely fail to sufficiently and comprehensively put into meaningful words how the inconsistency of the PHP language doesn’t play a role AT ALL when building actual web applications for actual users.

It just. Doesn’t. Matter. Choose Symfony or Laravel, and you are in for a wonderful development experience, from setup to dependency management to architecture to implementation to testing to deployment – for certain kinds of projects it’s just perfect.

elpatoisthebest4y ago

I agree with you, and it's super hard to explain. But if you have the right type of project requirements, Laravel is unbelievably great to work with. I love other languages more than PHP, but for a real world, client facing project that I want to be mostly hands off, Laravel would get my vote 9/10 times.

osrec4y ago

I think you've sufficiently and comprehensively put it into meaningful words above!

The truth is, those who care to use the language properly know this already. Those who wish to dismiss it always will, and this happens to be an easy angle of attack.

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