Hello everyone, I’m writing this not as an article but rather as a survey to gather opinions and understand why the PHP language is still so disparaged and why its features are so often undermined.
If you think PHP is great, why? And if, on the contrary, you don’t like PHP, why not, and why do the technologies you use seem better than PHP?
I’m well aware that the choice of language depends on the project, so don’t hesitate to give some context if you feel the need.
Looking forward to hearing from you

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The post seeks reader opinions on why PHP is often criticized and why its features are undermined. It invites both positive and negative views on PHP, asking for context to understand different perspectives better.

Why people complain about PHP

I use PHP and I think people don’t like PHP coz of it’s past. When php came out it was not so sophisticated. And that made their mindset as it was bad and they didn’t get any chance to update their thoughts.
That is my opinion, it can be way off the truth but PHP has grown a great deal with time.
Hope this helps.

The fear of PHP’s past is understandable, but each new feature since PHP 7.0 has introduced modern concepts and significantly improved the language. PHP needs more advocates and a collective effort from the community to showcase its power and potential to the world.

I started out with PHP and used VanillaJS/jQuery for progressive enhancement. I then went further and built out apps using Angular 1, Vue, React, and Svelte and so feel that I’m very qualified to say that I’ve played with enough tech to give a fair opinion.
PHP is the best option most of the time if you know what you’re doing. React is a complete mess even if you know what you are doing.

<ol>
<li>i love php</li>
<li>i loved it since 5.3 and i still do. It is simple, uncomplicated. Low entry barier, no need for gazillion tools like transpilers and this to that converters and runtime wars and yarn/npm struggle. Nope. CTRL+S refresh result. Tada.</li>
<li>most people crying about “bad php” never used it on a real project</li>
<li>most people crying about how old and un-evolved the language is never needed to use more than good ol 5.3 had to offer while building hello world kinda apps.</li>
<li>most of all this is just an opinion. A lot of good sites is being done in php, as well as js or python or ruby. Its a matter of personal or company preferrence, nothing more. There are no real differences in 99% of time and none should wage war for it. See the market, see whom you can hire and for what money, and what you need to do. Fck hype, fck fancy fashion. Do economic decision. Almost any language will do.</li>
<li>but php is the best 🤣</li>
</ol>

I once watched a video by Rasmus (PHP Creator) talking about the language being stateless, then I realized “This is why PHP is the best language for building web applications” because HTTP it self is stateless.
I personally have years of PHP experience, but I have not built any huge project with it. I decided to learn the docs to understand the language and how it works and I discovered a lot of features and functionalities that PHP developers might have not come across, which makes me feel “PHP developers are lazy”.
We want to rely on PHP frameworks which takes away the simplicity of the language and adds a steep learning curve, “fun boy communities”, vendor lock-in etc. I am not saying frameworks are bad but they bring their own complexities and if you don’t abide by their rules then you can’t simply build your PHP app.
Talking about frameworks, Laravel has proven to be the framework that has saved us (PHP developers) from conversations like what we are discussing right now. Personally I would give the credit to Symfony because of it’s component based approach and we can get to know that Composer and Laravel (and other known PHP tools) were built with some Symfony components.
CodeIgniter has served its purpose before as a framework with small foot print and easy to work with, but destroyed it with the current version.
What am I trying to say here?
<ol>
<li>
Built-in features like Coroutines and Generators by using the “yield” keyword have been there for years but we hardly heard of asynchronous PHP.
</li>
<li>
Again pcntl and sockets are there to implement asynchronous PHP but few developers can work with it.
</li>
<li>
Standard PHP Library have been around but few PHP developers can implement it.
</li>
<li>
We have fibers now but you get to see few tutorials mentioning it.
</li>
<li>
PHP has one of the best security features when writing code but because of poor knowledge about it, the haters talk about it being vulnerable.
</li>
</ol>
So to end my rant, PHP is the best language that has ever happened to the Web Development Community and we should proud of such a community and improve on it just as the project is growing looking at what has happened from PHP 7 to PHP 8.4.
PHP IS AWESOME !!!