PHP is growing these days. Some of the hip crowd are coming back, small business never left and globally it is gaining as more developers come online. PHP offers so much so easily it's hard to replace.
Why choose PHP over python, node, ruby, elixir, go, etc. There are just so many great choices that offer just as much and more than PHP. I get that PHP has made major strides over the years. I just don't see why you would choose PHP for a greenfield project.
One component is the fact that it comes out of the box on a great many hosting providers and it's part of the old "standard" LAMP stack. You don't have to set up any reverse proxy crap and the architecture is simple enough - you access a .php file which is really just HTML with some embedded code and it interprets the file. The concept couldn't be any closer to JavaScript which I suspect has attracted so much attention from beginners just because it's everywhere on web clients, just as PHP is everywhere on web servers.
Well, my guess is that PHP offers a lot more to the beginner.
When you've been doing this a while, you can appreciate what e.g. Python gives you in structure, maintainability, and lack of foot-guns.
But when you're still in the "how does this work? Why won't this work? It worked!" phase, having less boilerplate, and fewer non-problem domain concerns (types? modules? tuples? Say what you mean, Old Man!) might be really valuable.
I think the best thing I remember about PHP is probably its online manual. Each library function had a few full use cases underneath.
> But when you're still in the "how does this work? Why won't this work? It worked!" phase, having less boilerplate, and fewer non-problem domain concerns (types? modules? tuples? Say what you mean, Old Man!) might be really valuable
However, modern php isnt being sold as index.php and a mysql connection. It's Doctrine, composer and laravel/symphony. Which have their fair share of boilerplate.
>I think the best thing I remember about PHP is probably its online manual. Each library function had a few full use cases underneath
The problem with PHP is that you need the online manual everytime you want to use a function because the argument order is so
inconsistent.
The same is true of Perl, but (depending on your definition of "not dying") it's not clear that Perl isn't dying.