PHP Is the Best Choice for Long‑Term Business
Tomas Votruba advocates for PHP as a stable, long-term business solution, highlighting its established frameworks, competitive innovation, and advanced tools that enhance code quality and adaptability for future changes.
Read original article
Tomas Votruba argues that PHP is the best choice for long-term business development due to its stability, healthy competition, and robust ecosystem. He references a podcast with Pieter Levels, who emphasizes a technology stack that includes vanilla PHP, jQuery, and SQLite, highlighting the pitfalls of hype-driven development in the tech industry. Votruba points out that many popular JavaScript frameworks require frequent rewrites, which can be costly for businesses. In contrast, PHP frameworks like Symfony and Laravel have been around for years and continue to evolve, providing a reliable foundation for developers. The competition between these frameworks fosters innovation and offers businesses a choice, ensuring they can build sustainable solutions. Votruba also notes the advancements in PHP's core technology, such as the introduction of Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) and tools like PHPStan and Rector, which enhance code quality and facilitate upgrades. He concludes that while PHP may not have the fastest performance or the most modern syntax, its comprehensive ecosystem and open-source nature make it a practical choice for businesses looking to minimize long-term costs and adapt to future changes.
- PHP offers long-term stability with established frameworks like Symfony and Laravel.
- The competition between PHP frameworks drives innovation and provides businesses with options.
- Advanced tools in the PHP ecosystem, such as PHPStan and Rector, improve code quality and facilitate upgrades.
- PHP's open-source nature allows for adaptability in response to future changes.
- Hype-driven development in other languages can lead to costly rewrites, making PHP a more sustainable choice.
Related
The demise of the mildly dynamic website (2022)
The evolution of websites from hand-crafted HTML to PHP enabled dynamic web apps with simple deployment. PHP's decline led to static site generators replacing mildly dynamic sites, shifting to JavaScript for features like comments.
New Web Development: Or, why Copilots and chatbots are bad for modern web dev
The analysis critiques Copilots, chatbots, and React for web development, citing slow sites, complex code, and high costs. It advocates for a shift to browser APIs, CSS, and HTML for better performance and lower expenses. Transition challenges include finding developers skilled in vanilla JavaScript. Organizations are urged to prioritize simplicity, efficiency, and core web technology training.
The self-fulfilling prophecy of React
Josh Collinsworth critiques React's dominance in front-end development, arguing it lags behind competitors like Vue and Svelte in performance and ease of use, urging developers to consider alternatives.
I'm Back, Ruby on Rails
The author reassesses Ruby on Rails, praising its stability, built-in features, and supportive community, while highlighting its advantages for rapid development and deployment, making it suitable for startups.
Programming Languages 2024
IEEE Spectrum's 2024 programming language rankings highlight Python's dominance, SQL's employer preference, and the rise of Typescript and Rust, while Apex and Solidity emerge as new contenders in technology.
13 comments> There are 544384348946349783246237946349732647 npm packages that need updated.
> There are 548432782344434 critical npm packages.
It's all about what works. My crazy opinion is PHP makes a great CLI, so does nodejs. Node has amazing frameworks, PHP is battle-hardened back-end wise but front end you're coming back to JS. I honestly hate what the JS bloated internet has become and enjoy PHP, but I also enjoy javscript.
Tons of apps are already electron bloated stuff; JS is in.
Use what works and what isn't going to break.
Be mindful of JS CDNS and supply chain attacks.
Keep things up to date. Fix them if they break.
It's basically a list of nice things going for PHP, but you can write that for literally any tech in any context — like, I could argue that you should build web sites with the Unity game engine or raw Python by listing out-of-context stats all day long.
Whenever the author actually compares, it breaks down:
- Ok, so Lavarel is from 2011 — React is from 2013, Django is from 2005...so what
- Sure, there may be a new js framework everyday, but not a new version of js...and anyway, an active and innovative community is automatically bad why?
- PHP has "2 strong framework players" — ok, so has Python, js has two to four...
- "lack of advanced technology" — what does this even mean?
"Last but not least, other languages lack advanced technology."Fortunately, many other frameworks are long-term stable, but also have a good programming language behind them. Django, Ruby on Rails, and there are similar options in Java or C#.
As for the other points, sure, PHP might be the one language where there are exactly two strong web frameworks. But I don’t see the problem of there being 3 or 4. Django has plenty of competition that drives innovation – web2py, flask, etc.
And same for those other claims. All major languages have various kinds of code analysis tools. Most have healthy communities, etc.
It doesn’t really matter which language you use, it’s about getting the job done. Some people can get thing done quicker in certain languages just because they are good at what they do, not because the tech stack is perfect.
This is an opinion masquerading as fact, backed up by terrible reasoning.
See https://docs.python.org/3.8/library/ast.html for example.
Related
The demise of the mildly dynamic website (2022)
The evolution of websites from hand-crafted HTML to PHP enabled dynamic web apps with simple deployment. PHP's decline led to static site generators replacing mildly dynamic sites, shifting to JavaScript for features like comments.
New Web Development: Or, why Copilots and chatbots are bad for modern web dev
The analysis critiques Copilots, chatbots, and React for web development, citing slow sites, complex code, and high costs. It advocates for a shift to browser APIs, CSS, and HTML for better performance and lower expenses. Transition challenges include finding developers skilled in vanilla JavaScript. Organizations are urged to prioritize simplicity, efficiency, and core web technology training.
The self-fulfilling prophecy of React
Josh Collinsworth critiques React's dominance in front-end development, arguing it lags behind competitors like Vue and Svelte in performance and ease of use, urging developers to consider alternatives.
I'm Back, Ruby on Rails
The author reassesses Ruby on Rails, praising its stability, built-in features, and supportive community, while highlighting its advantages for rapid development and deployment, making it suitable for startups.
Programming Languages 2024
IEEE Spectrum's 2024 programming language rankings highlight Python's dominance, SQL's employer preference, and the rise of Typescript and Rust, while Apex and Solidity emerge as new contenders in technology.