Is PHP Still a Worthwhile Language To Learn?

post from Belgium-based programmer Brent Roose:

It’s no secret among web developers and programmers in general: PHP doesn’t have the best reputation. Despite still being one of the most used languages to build web applications; over the years PHP has managed to get itself a reputation of messy codebases, inexperienced developers, insecure code, an inconsistent core library, and what not. While many of the arguments against PHP still stand today, there’s also a bright side: you can write clean and maintainable, fast and reliable applications in PHP.

  • In this post, I want to look at this bright side of PHP development. I want to show you that, despite its many shortcomings, PHP is a worthwhile language to learn. I want you to know that the PHP 5 era is coming to an end. That, if you want to, you can write modern and clean PHP code, and leave behind much of the mess it was 10 years ago.

The article notes PHP’s opt-in type system and performance-enhancing rewrites (including the ability to store compiled chunks of PHP code in memory). And it argues that PHP “is still evolving today,” with a package repository averaging over 25 million downloads a day. There’s also PHP web application frameworks (as well as asynchronous frameworks), so “PHP isn’t just WordPress anymore.”

And in keeping with the core team’s yearly release cycle, PHP 8 is expected at the end of 2020, which will include a JIT compiler, “allowing PHP to enter new areas besides web development…”

7 Likes

Popular cms like wordpress and framework like laravel are based on php and has very large community, so you can count on it.

nowadays people are more concerned about the security point of view ,which means people are relying on technologies that are far more secure as many of you know the vulnerabilities found in php, if you go ahead and see people are shifting towards technologies which are more secure

1 Like

PHP is my favorite in terms of learning. I had no idea of computer languages before. But PHP was the easiest to learn and understand how languages works. Like you don’t have to declare variable or variable type etc. PHP do it for you. So after the basic learning I got to the OOP and after that I learnt allot and then it was easy to understand Java C++ and others.
Now I think Nodejs is doing better. PHP need to introduce some thing to fit in

1 Like