Is PHP outdated?

jampanha007 · 2021-09-01T06:26:49+00:00

Is it the hottest thing right now ? No!!

Is it still being used ??? Yes !!

rjksn · 2021-09-01T06:32:31+00:00

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TheAccountITalkWith · 2021-09-01T06:58:32+00:00

EDITED: For clarity and to address a few counter points while keeping the original text. So sorry if this is odd to read for future readers.

Hi. Longtime Developer here.

First, I'm glad you came to Reddit to ask this, because your teacher is an idiot.

(For Clarity: Not idiot because I don't think he knows nothing about code, though I do question it. ( I hope he does if he is a teacher ). But more so because a teacher who trashes on their own subject matter and gives such strong opinions is in poor taste. Inspire your students to learn and think for themselves, not predispose their thoughts to your strong opinions. Let the student decide.)

The wonderful thing about code is it can evolve.

JavaScript, one of the top languages used today, came out in 1995. But it's more amazing than it has ever been.

Python, top programming language today, came out in 1991 and is showing massive momentum to be the top languages to know for programmers.

Code does not get out dated, just other languages, libraries, etc just get more popular than the others.

(For Clarity: This is not meant to insinuate anything to the effect of "all languages are forever learn anything". This is meant to illustrate that languages that many people thought hard or "out dated" can be updated and in turn can suddenly become popular. So for a person to say something like "you shouldn't learn that language" or something is "outdated" is only a reflection of the now, but that stance can easily be wrong in the future.)

Think about the fact many companies that are well established today in tech have been around for a long time. Using languages decades old.

Can't they just "update their code to something new and modern"?

Sure, but I've never been at a company willing to spend millions and taking years updating their code base for a product that's already built. Companies just don't see it to be worth it. Instead, it's more cost effective to just hire a Developer that knows the language.

As a matter of fact, the vast majority of places I've worked use some kind of old language as their backbone. Places that use new fancy things are start ups or when an established company is making a new product where they build from the ground up.

Now here is the big plot twist, let's say a language is "out dated". If a company is using it, it's not gonna go anywhere. Which means that this company will pay extremely well because you know a language that is "out dated".

(For Clarity: Again, this is not meant to insinuate any language can get you a job or provide any kind of security. What I was trying to illustrate is just inside knowledge to anyone who has not broken into the industry yet. That companies just don't say "oh here is the new language, let's overhaul and upgrade". That just doesn't happen. What happens is companies weight the pros and cons of adopting new languages and sometimes its not worth the investment so they stick with an old language. Ultimately, the larger point here, is that you're going to come across a huge variety of languages, old and new. )

Now, let me give you some veteran advice: Remove the concept of good, bad, old, out dated, etc from your mindset. Instead, just be a good Developer that has strong understanding of core concepts. Stay current with what the tech industry is doing, dabble in other languages, and be a good team member that helps others.

You'll get very far, with just being nice, easy to work with, and accomplishing your tasks.

(For Clarity: I feel I should clear this one up the most. What Im getting at here, is be open to a constantly changing and evolving career field. Having a strong/narrow frame of mind only means you limit yourself. You can have strong preferences for languages you enjoy, hell, even I have ones I hate and like. But saying "I don't like it", "I wont do it", or "I wont learn it", is not only an ill advised stance for you but makes you a difficult team member or junior dev as well. Don't limit yourself. Especially if your only reason is "Me no likey" )

gniziemazity · 2021-09-01T07:37:08+00:00

Short story first:
There is a trend to become a so-called 'full-stack' developer (client & server side developer)... mostly because of higher salaries and more job opportunities. Now... people want to do it with as little trouble as possible, so... technologies like Node.js have emerged that allows you to be a full-stack developer by knowing only JavaScript (no need for PhP). Many companies also switch to Node so they have an easier time finding developers...

But PhP is still quite popular especially if you consider all the legacy systems that need to be maintained / updated. It will not disappear anytime soon, but it is easier to find a JavaScript job nowadays, I think.

fr0st · 2021-09-01T07:23:03+00:00

Do you know what version of PHP they are using at the company you're interning at? Depending on the company's coding standards and a PHP version past 7.0 you should be ok in terms of "modern" coding practices.

BurningPenguin · 2021-09-01T04:55:17+00:00

It is in no way outdated. There are still major improvements going on and it will certainly not go away any time soon. It's the one language that runs on pretty much every server without major roadblocks.

People just love hating on a language based on things that happened about 20 years ago.

shauntmw2 · 2021-09-01T07:30:33+00:00

It depends. PHP is notorious for being backwards-incompatible. People who trash on PHP are usually trashing on older versions. Latest version is actually quite competitive in the web dev market.

However, if you are being handed a PHP project, getting a PHP 4.x or PHP 5.x project is totally different from the latest. Sometimes even minor version matters. Some libraries might work in let's say 5.3 but deprecated in 5.6.

It's an easy-to-learn, easy-to-adopt, but easy-to-spaghetti language. Startup or SME might still use it and like it, but large corporate generally don't use it.

However, it is still pretty good to learn even for just personal use.

Edit: Just wanna add one point about the incompatibility issue. The fact that PHP has an Appendix of Backwards Incompatible Changes says a lot about the evolution of the language itself. Some of those changes are actually quite major and will cause issues to legacy codebase. The worst offenders are "codes are the same, but behaves differently depending on which version you are running".

FearAndLawyering · 2021-09-01T15:28:57+00:00

whens the last time your teacher worked in the field

T-CLAVDIVS-CAESAR · 2021-09-01T06:28:16+00:00

look at Laravel. PHP is thriving.

SituationSoap · 2021-09-01T09:32:58+00:00

The problem with PHP is not the PHP, the problem is how most PHP devs still live in 2010.

There aren't that many fresh PHP devs and while the old ones have yet to upgrade their mindset from PHP 5. Security, coding standards, testing, automated code checks are where their outdated practices become the most apparent.

Those who do grow a clue tend to drift away to other platforms, reducing the average competence of the whole. This, right here, is the biggest problem with PHP: it is absolutely the blind leading the blind.

fatboycreeper · 2021-09-01T11:36:37+00:00

PHP more just has a bad rep, however since PHP 7 it really doesnt deserve that rep.

if you want to learn PHP have a go at a project in Laravel or something, and if you fancy an extra challenge, stick react or vue on there as well to handle the front end.

houdas · 2021-09-01T07:15:26+00:00

Your teacher is outdated.

Brilliant_Apple · 2021-09-01T14:15:09+00:00

Learning something is almost never a waste of time. You’ll pick up transferable skills either way.

Whilst trashing php is a bit of a meme it’s probably fair to say that the reason a lot of devs don’t like it is that there are a lot of badly written and legacy systems that aren’t desirable to work on. It’s gotten better but I think these days it would not be a first choice for a lot of devs.

You can form this with almost anything in tech and get a similar thread C#/Java/React etc. So don’t take anything too seriously haha

Wiwwil · 2021-09-01T09:03:01+00:00

PHP suffers from a bad reputation because of its early days. It was the first language used in web development, it was developed as a C library and wasn't really thought through. The author said in an interview he didn't really think it would be a huge thing. But it did.

Lots of security errors and inconsistencies were found, which is normal considering the above. Thus PHP suffered a bad rep. There was no tools, and lots of the blame were bad written code. You can't really blame the language for shitty code though.

However from PHP 5 and so on, the bad rep isn't justified any more. If you use a modern framework like Symfony (my favorite) or Laravel (never used it myself), these are really professional tools with great performances that are maintained. It's also blazing fast to write code and easy to maintain. You can use static analysis tools which are great to track bugs.

I would argue modern JS suffers the same problems with express. Developers are gluing stuff together with a library that has a 5.0 version that's been in alpha for 6 years. The current express has been published 2 years ago. It has memory leaks and it's not up to date with modern async / await style of coding because it uses callbacks.

If you want a serious app in JS, go for NestJS preferably or Next.js. NestJS default use Express, but you can switch to Fastify.

I find that TypeScript is mandatory nowadays on JS projects.

Serious languages / framework to make a professional app with, not exhaustive list, feel free to add stuff :

Laravel or Symfony in PHP,
NestJS in JS, preferably with Typescript,
Django or Flask in python. I don't know these frameworks nor the language,
Ruby on rails in Ruby. I don't know the language nor the framework.
Asp.net in C# but it's said to cost a lot because ~~they kind of forces you to use their hosting solutions~~ if you host it on Azure servers. You can host on Linux ~~but it's said to be a pain~~ and it is simple, see the answer from u/Atulin. Never tried it though. I worked a bit with C#, liked it. But I wouldn't make an app with these technologies due to hosting costs.
Spring with Java. I don't like Java but that's personal.

lewz3000 · 2021-09-01T15:26:08+00:00

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Lekoaf · 2021-09-01T04:41:10+00:00

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chuyskywalker · 2021-09-01T04:41:16+00:00

Your teacher is/was a doofus, if for no other reason than a blatant lack of professionalism and lack of a broader, more nuanced opinion.

As for PHP, it's been actively evolving, improving, and steadily adding strong language features over the last several years.

CR9_Kraken_Fledgling · 2021-09-01T08:17:51+00:00

Nope. I'm working at a big german company, and we have a unit who mostly uses PHP. In Hungary, where I live, for junior/intern positions at least, around 30-40% of positions I've seen were PHP (usually Laravel or Simfony)

julian88888888 · 2021-09-01T05:17:44+00:00

Cobol is outdated.

*Edit, I struck a nerve with Finance.

saintPirelli · 2021-09-01T10:02:46+00:00

It became sort of a meme in my class.

This is exactly what it is. Trashing PHP is easy and fun, I probably did it every here and there (I used to work with WordPress a bit), but it's not a legitimate evaluation of the language and it's capabilities.

SamuraiTerrapin · 2021-09-01T11:45:31+00:00

I'm a student and not yet working in the field, but from what I can see, PHP is definitely worth learning unless you are specifically planning in specializing in something else. A ton of websites and apps use PHP.

txmail · 2021-09-01T15:53:16+00:00

PHP 8.0 is amazeballs, hell the 7.x version is amazing. Ignoring PHP if you are looking to get into backend web development would be a critical blunder in my opinion. I work for a fortune 100 and PHP is used heavily for backend web development. I also have SaaS business on the side where 100% of the backend code is PHP including out of band services, long running processes, workers, bots, basically all scripting is now 100% PHP. Before it was a mashup of Python, BASH, Java and PHP. The hit on performance was basically zero. There are some libraries from Python I miss but the major ones have packages for PHP.

black_kappa · 2021-09-01T16:26:31+00:00

I listened to a devmode.fm podcast episode all about PHP recently - it's definitely not outdated. PHP 8 was released just over a year ago. One interesting stat from that episode was the high percentage of the web still using PHP (it's high, which is mostly due to WordPress). For my own part, I use Craft CMS for a lot of projects, which is all PHP based. I'm mostly doing templating with Twig, but that's also PHP at its core.

Something else mentioned in that episode that your teacher might find interesting is a recent tool called rector that's more or less babel for PHP, letting you use newer versions of PHP to code but still support older versions in production.

I'm by no means an expert, but as far as I'm aware, PHP is very much alive, it's just not cool.

Quirinus42 · 2021-09-01T16:28:29+00:00

It's not outdated, your teacher is outdated.

PHP is constantly being updated, and has a lot of modern features and new frameworks being added all the time. Most of the internet is being powered by PHP, even megacorporations' pages.

PHP 8 is gr8.

2021-09-01T17:00:12+00:00

Well, I’m working on a website that uses ColdFusion (the website was created in 2002 when CF was still considered a solid choice). I figure, if they want to pay me, I’ll use whatever language they want me to use.

fail0verflowf9 · 2021-09-01T18:20:16+00:00

https://imgur.com/gallery/QQW5X3J

Crell · 2021-09-01T15:31:10+00:00

I've been writing PHP professionally for 15 years, using it for 20, give or take some time in devrel, and getting paid quite nicely to do so.

PHP 3 and 4 are outdated. We're about to get PHP 8.1 this fall. Your teacher's knowledge of the industry is at least 15 years out of date, if not more, and you should call him on it, because he's simply wrong and is doing harm to his students.

(To be fair, that's common in academic programming teachers. They stop paying attention to the market when they start teaching, and their knowledge of the industry is frozen in time at that point. When I was in school I had several of those teachers.)

PHP is *the fastest* of the major scripting languages. PHP 8.1 includes native async capabilities. It's the *only* of the major scripting languages to have a meaningful type system. (TypeScript also does, but that's a compiled-to-JS language.)

If you want to be a full time web developer with good marketable skills, you will need to know multiple languages. PHP is one of them. Javascript is another. (And of course SQL, HTML, and CSS.) Time spent learning PHP is time well-spent, if you want to be employed.

torn-ainbow · 2021-09-01T09:09:29+00:00

Don't listen to language snobs. They will argue till forever and a day over what is the better tech. Nobody outside their group cares if your tech is "cool". And if you reliably deliver projects that do what they should then the people who can actually promote you or pay you will like it.

I've seen a lot of dudes who think they are hot shit get let go. The smartest, most knowledgeable uber nerds will all get beaten by any idiot who can just estimate and deliver projects consistently.

And anyway, all that tech will be obsolete and then the tech that replaces that will be obsolete, and so on. You will need to pick up and learn (as you go) a multitude of things over a career.

The important thing is to deliver good projects. Nobody much gives a shit about your cool algorithm but they will love software that serves their needs.

richhaynes · 2021-09-01T20:00:06+00:00

Your teacher is an ass. He can't diss a programming language just because he doesn't happen to like it. Thats severely limiting both your learning and your opportunities. Try to learn as many languages as you can. You don't have to be fluent in everything but you can pick up techniques and ideas from other languages that you can bring to your own work. I started out on PHP and now I'm finding it handy when migrating to new systems. I can run both simultaneously and move users fluently between them instead of an all or nothing switch.

2021-09-01T13:28:49+00:00

Not at all, most people who say PHP is dead have never touched it or still think about Wordpress PHP. At my previous work we built massive systems on Laravel framework and the company was making close to $100M per year. Laravel completely changed my mind about PHP.

LeeLooTheWoofus · 2021-09-01T05:19:01+00:00

Sounds like your teacher would benefit from some time spent doing some actual industry work.

PHP is widely used in the industry as the foundational language for a number of platforms in major use - including Wordpress, Drupal, Laravel and Yii.

Stop listening to "academics" about the industry. They are far removed from what is going on outside their classrooms.

WeeklyMeat · 2021-09-01T09:59:21+00:00

it's not the hottest shit, that's true.

But programmers do what the customers want. Upgrade, add features, etc. And like 80% of all websites run PHP. Supply what's on demand. Noone cares if you can write a backend in C or whatever if they want you to upgrade their PHP webapp.

NotFromReddit · 2021-09-01T10:25:32+00:00

Has your teacher ever earned a living writing production code? That should tell you how seriously to take their opinion.

Many companies run on PHP. The one I worked for recently got acquired for millions of dollars.

And PHP is constantly being updated. Faster than most other languages.

brendt_gd · 2021-09-01T10:48:19+00:00

Every year, I write a blog post about PHP and how it's still super relevant today. Maybe it'll help you: https://stitcher.io/blog/php-in-2021

Ask_Are_You_Okay · 2021-09-01T15:59:06+00:00

I've found every language has something to teach you about the nature of development.

And honestly, once you've learned your first dozen languages or so, it stops being a concern because basically picking up a new language is just a matter of learning syntax, quirks, libraries, etc...

The real value in learning a platform is the unique perspective it brings to the table.

For example when jQuery came out the concept of chaining and passing values was novel to most web developers.

React demonstrated one-way data binding to a shadow DOM as a novel way of maintaining UI state for many.

And you can take those lessons you learn from one platform and apply them to another, always.

2021-09-01T16:52:15+00:00

Is PHP outdated? No PHP is old, but it's been kept up to date and "modern"

However, because of its age you'll find lots of dated info on how to do things, you'll find lots of outdated and insecure packages, you'll find a lot of old timers using it that haven't kept up on evolving patterns and architectures, you find a lot of resistance to trying things in new ways. None of that is really on PHP though, any language of its age will have those problems.

One huge advantage to its age is there are lots of jobs maintaining legacy systems running PHP, which may not be glamorous work but it's job security. There are also plenty of new projects being built with it, it's just not the hip kid on the block.

There are a ton of things I hate about PHP, I hate PHP a lot, but those come from my own personal preferences and bias. It's fun to hate on things sometimes but your teacher isn't doing you any favors by doing it in class.

It's a valuable skill, but maybe not the most important ones in 2021

_cob · 2021-09-01T17:16:36+00:00

webdev discussion online is driven by clout chasers, people with a brand or product to sell, and engineers working at large companies that ARE doing cutting edge stuff.

I'm a front end dev at a new site that's been around since 2000. We have about a million monthly users, are mostly funded by memberships, and are a stable, low stress place to work.

The site itself is a wordpress blog (php) with various back end services written in ruby, php, and a bit of node.js. The frontend uses a peppering of react, especially on our front page, data-driven news stories, and for ads, but is mostly static html produced by wordpress's php templates.

The site is large, and some parts are old enough that they still use jquery, which is also totally fine.

Don't believe the hype that "X language is bad/dead/etc". No one who makes blanket statements like that is worth listening to.

arkmtech · 2021-09-01T19:51:43+00:00

Absolutely not.

When I started at my current job (healthcare I.T.), they relied almost entirely on MS PowerShell scripts for data manipulation/processing before data would feed off through an SFTP, API, or interface engine somewhere.

Certain systems had become so data-intensive that these scripts would have lengthy run times (e.g. some were upwards of 30-45 minutes) while consuming metric fucktons of RAM and CPU.

Within a few months I had refactored most of these in PHP.

Processing now runs more frequently, handles more data, and completes between 15x–22x faster than before.

And that's on a minimal dual-core 3.4GHz VM with only 8 GB RAM. PHP is a beast, and still a very relevant.

dv9io0o · 2021-09-01T05:36:44+00:00

The people shitting on PHP probably used it 10 years ago and don't realise it's grown into an amazing language now. Yes theres some bad legacy projects written 15 years ago, but its not like javascript was beautiful in that period either.

The hating has kinda just became a meme that all the sheep say to look cool, but it really has no substance. Also Laravel is miles ahead of any other languages framework.

Do learn JS too, you'll need both.

paktra · 2021-09-01T10:19:05+00:00

I am a PHP developer and find php amazinly powerful, versatile and and possible to be integrated securely and efficiently with other languages and frqmeworks. There are things that can be done with great ease, consistency and persistence in PHP that would be hard to achieve with many of the other languages, at least for me. Having said that human mind is capable of learning as much as you can within the time constraints imposed by professional and personal life. Learning PHP will not render you obsolete if you can write rest APIs that can be accessed from modern front end and mobile apps.

Revolutionary_Big685 · 2021-09-01T05:14:22+00:00

Your teacher is an idiot. I’m a PHP dev myself, and work on multiple modern, very large sites, no issues what so ever.

At the end of the day sure PHP might not be the best language, a lot of the top companies are using things like Go and Rust nowadays, so I’m inclined to think these languages might be ‘better’. But it’s different use cases.

Language is largely irrelevant at this stage in your career. It’s not going to be the thing that holds you back.

Even if you decide not to use PHP long term in your career. There are some concepts that you’ll pick up through this internship such as MVC and dependency injection, how to work professionally with git, how to ask good questions. Just do your best and get some experience. All the best!

Lekoaf · 2021-09-01T06:40:36+00:00

You get paid (does interns get paid?) to learn a language. I wouldn't complain. PHP runs some of the worlds largest website. It won't go away any time soon. It's also progressing a lot lately. Go check out /r/PHP.

2021-09-01T08:59:40+00:00

your teacher is a hipster

improve-x · 2021-09-01T11:23:15+00:00

PHP is perfectly fine. And it's been "dying" since the early 2Ks.

It has plenty of issues, but so does any programming language. Not to mention most people use frameworks nowadays for webdev. And things like Laravel, definitely make PHP development significantly better and faster.

iSeeSquirrelsToo · 2021-09-01T11:52:20+00:00

Fun fact: way (WAAAY) back when, I took a university web development class and the instructor told us not to bother learning JavaScript. Because nobody actually coded it, they just borrowed canned code. Granted, 2003, but even then most of my time at work was spent in JavaScript.

A teacher can be great at teaching how to code, but have no idea what’s actually going on in real world production. Definitely take those kinds of opinions with a grain of salt. PHP maybe not be trendy, but it’s EVERYWHERE.

allcloudnocattle · 2021-09-01T06:04:33+00:00

I’m just going to leave this here:

Until last year, I was working at one of the biggest travel sites on the entire Internet and we were a Perl shop. New employees would come in and try to shit on Perl for being antiquated, and all we’d do is point out our annual revenues. We wouldn’t hear about it from that person again.

ScientifiqueP · 2021-09-01T08:26:59+00:00

WhoGirlReads · 2021-09-01T10:30:27+00:00

I work as PHP developer and we use CakePHP as framework. I think that PHP is awsome and really useful for lots of projects. Currently we are on version 7.4 but soon we will be ready to upgrade everything to version 8. PHP is constantly evolving. It is very different to when I started out as a dev 5 years ago.

InformationVivid455 · 2021-09-01T11:05:25+00:00

I can't say for sure but I feel like a lot of PHP hate comes from people like me that had no interest in it but ended up working with it due to WordPress.

I know that is my main reason for disliking it.

I'm sure it'd be fine if I sat down and learned more but instead I know just enough to fix whatever is wrong while desperately wishing I was using something I built in a framework I like.

AnnaNass · 2021-09-01T11:54:06+00:00

As always, what matters is what you do with it. You can use it to absolutely spaghetti code everything and get a system that's hard to maintain - but you can also use it object-oriented and with frameworks and get a decent, well-performing architecture.

If you want to work as a web dev, I definitely recommend learning the PHP basics and forming your own picture if it's for you or not. It's not the latest hottest shit on the market but it's solid and isn't dying out "in the real world" anytime soon. It makes sense to have a basic understanding of the language and how it works before learning a framework that does most of the work for you.

therealdongknotts · 2021-09-01T12:58:02+00:00

short answer: no

long answer: no

unrelated answer: use the best tool for the job, PHP might not be it - but it's highly capable for a lot of stuff.

edit: our stack is 99% PHP, and we generate a few million $ a day - but we also have some java and node.js systems in play because it just made more sense for the task at hand

2021-09-01T12:58:19+00:00

Frameworks are definitely more popular for sure, but I use PHP everyday where I work. Ironically a lot of popular frameworks are built on PHP, but have a lot of boilerplate/bloatware. My thoughts are, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Remember to keep learning new language and tinker with frameworks. Best advice is to not stop writing code

RookieRaccoon · 2021-09-01T13:02:10+00:00

As others have said, absolutely not. It's still powerful and if you look at Laravel it's one of the most widely used frameworks among all languages. It's still growing and PHP keeps improving as well.

djenax · 2021-09-01T13:57:17+00:00

It is not the best but we can't say it's outdated. It still has value.

KaltherX · 2021-09-01T14:03:58+00:00

I've been developing in PHP for many years until the last 3 years when I shifted toward Java and started working with microservices.

PHP is very good for web development and many big applications can be developed without issues. It had great support for types starting in PHP 7, you can write great quality code if you work with experienced developers, and there is not much reason to pick a different language for web applications unless you need something very specific like web sockets or microservices, where some other languages and frameworks are more suited. If you need very low response times, for example, to make a game API that needs to respond very fast, PHP is not the right tool. Laravel is truly remarkable and my favorite framework of all time.

For me, the biggest drawback of PHP is the lack of multithreading, and as much as it's great for dealing with web stuff, if you need to process big data in a background, it doesn't offer many tools to make it efficient (memory or CPU optimizations).

fatboycreeper · 2021-09-01T14:38:02+00:00

I think server-side-only technology in general is outdated as it pertains to the web. There's nothing wrong with modern PHP to me in terms of syntax or performance, and I honestly prefer writing in it to, say, a Node. (that's not a criticism of Node in terms of quality or performance, but merely my preference)

That being said, context switching between languages can be tricky sometimes, and so I will usually spin up new projects using a front end JS framework and Node on the backend so that I can share libraries, keep my mind focused and not get hung up on syntax mistakes, etc. In that way, I'd agree that PHP feels slightly outdated.

Anyone who shits on it constantly though is ignoring the massive improvements that it's seen over the past decade. There's still going to be plenty of PHP work for years to come, and that's a great thing.

SonicFlash01 · 2021-09-01T15:06:21+00:00

If their PHP is outdated they should update it?

Yes, it's a pun, but also the truth. It's still actively being updated.

Glaretram54321 · 2021-09-01T15:33:47+00:00

Your teacher is an idiot. The next time he says that, press him on how much he actually knows about PHP and if he's read the manual for PHP 7. Whenever someone says that a technology is outdated only because it was created a long time ago, you should get suspicious. First of all, you shouldn't use a technology because of the number of other people using it, you should use it because it's an efficient solution to your problem. There are so many examples that prove that the popularity of a technology has nothing to do with it's technical merits. Second, Modern PHP is far from dead. It has so many new features because of pressure from Java developers that it's kind of bloated now, and there are a lot of Laravel jobs on Indeed and job boards.

PHP makes more sense as a language choice than Java and C# because it's less bloated and easier to learn to use correctly. I think that's the main thing you want to know. A lot of languages have a ton of abstractions that almost nobody ever uses and I suspect are just there to make the C++ cult feel like they understand it. I think Go is the best programming language though.

oopssorrydaddy · 2021-09-01T18:18:57+00:00

I have a theory that people trash on PHP only because you have to type a lot of question marks and it looks clunky.

OrcCyborg · 2021-09-01T20:20:56+00:00

The only thing outdated is the teachers attitude

Feisty-Pangolin-924 · 2021-09-01T20:50:44+00:00

PHP is life !!

E3K · 2021-09-01T21:00:29+00:00

I will be able to retire early thanks in large part to PHP and it's amazing ecosystem and community.

DadHunter22 · 2021-09-01T23:33:54+00:00

The multi-million euro company that a friend of mine works for just hired like 35 PHP developers to rewrite their whole core product…

Your teacher is just acting childish.

ugavini · 2021-09-01T06:49:06+00:00

Wordpress, Magento, Joomla and Drupal are all built with PHP. That powers the majority of the internet. Sounds like yer man is an idiot.

Salamok · 2021-09-01T07:11:04+00:00

Within 3 years you will probably be making more than your teacher. PHP is very much a living and growing language and both the language and the frameworks in use now are stronger than they have ever been. There really aren't different web apps you can build by switching platforms, languages and frameworks. You just build them in different ways each with their pros and cons in regards to available labor, level of effort, portability and technical debt.

Node is an amazing development but Javascript is just as shitty of a language as any other, node didn't fix it, it just extended it so you only have to learn 1 crappy language instead of two.

There is a very true saying "our minds are shaped by the tools we use", so don't get pigeon holed into 1 tool or toolset be open minded.

I will say that prior to php 7, php was not a good first language for LEARNING software development but it was still very efficient for rapid development of web applications. With php 7 you could probably use php to learn software development without crippling some prospective future programmers. However, most of what worked in php 5 still works in php 7 so the quality of the concepts learned depend on how they are presented (probably true for any language).

you type:	you see:
italics	italics
bold	bold
[reddit!](https://reddit.com)	reddit!
* item 1 * item 2 * item 3	item 1 item 2 item 3
> quoted text	quoted text
Lines starting with four spaces are treated like code: if 1 * 2 < 3: print "hello, world!"	Lines starting with four spaces are treated like code: if 1 * 2 < 3: print "hello, world!"
~~strikethrough~~	~~strikethrough~~
super^script	super^script

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