> A return to serious reading today is an “elitist” venture not because serious reading is necessarily reactionary or elitist, but because the twentieth-century attempt at the democratization of knowledge failed.
I would add that if that's the case, I would ask what it implies for the eventual success of the Protestant Reformation.
You can ask the same for any language, not only PHP:
- Why would anyone want to start something new with Ruby?
- Why would anyone want to start something new with Elixir?
You can choose any reason to pick a language, do you want a language with a lot of demand in the job market, learn Javascript, you will see a lot of frontend open positions, even more React open positions if you want to specialize in something.
Do you want a lively developer community, choose any language, I learned Java, PHP, Javascript and Ruby and all of them always had helpful people and a lot of courses to help me learn and try to code with good practices.
Answering the question seriously (assuming this is not trolling) here are some reasons to start something new with PHP in 2021:
1. Learning PHP 8 and a popular framework like Laravel will make easier to get a job on some small and medium companies. In the last job I had in a consulting firm, customers were asking for more Laravel developers to the point they accepted outsourcing because there was not enough talented Laravel developers in the US to cover the demand. There are thousands of bad PHP and Laravel developers, but there is not enough supply of good ones, so if you are talented and follow best practices, choosing PHP will make you shine between all those average developers.
2. I probably won't develop anything new with PHP 8 this year, but there are a lot of existing libraries and frameworks (Laravel and Symfony for example) that will benefit from implementing the new features of the language (reducing mess or making code more concise and readable). For the end user of those libraries and frameworks, very little will change since the interfaces don't change too much in order to allow backwards compatibility, so the existing ecosystem is a great reason to use PHP.
It has a very mature web dev ecosystem around Rails. It: is quick-to-learn, is OO to the bone, is FP where is fits with the OO, is easy to read, has little quirks.
Personally I'd go with something with stronger types, no "null" and proper sum types. But if you are cool with dynamic typing: Ruby is a great choice.
> Elixir
Ruby-like syntax (some advantages just mentioned) and BEAM runtime. Yields very scalable apps.
I do thing GP raises a valid concern. PHP is not for new apps, or even better put: for new teams. It's just too quirky and does not have the native browser support the other super popular + super quirky language JavaScript has.
As as a comparison: who'd start an app in Perl these days? Or COBOL?
At some point a language may be considered "legacy".
> is quick-to-learn, is OO to the bone, is FP where is fits with the OO, is easy to read, has little quirks.
Exactly same applies to PHP - without FP part but in exchange one is getting enormous, gargantuan ecosystem of libraries, developers, hosting, language oriented and designed to rapidly deliver result and easiest deployments out there.
Todays PHP is good, may be not trendy and hip right now, elitists may snark a bit but it's good language to deliver products.
Full of quirks (there's a whole subreddit for that /r/lolphp), not OO to the bone (more like tagged on), hellish to read, no proper FP stuff.
You may call people categorizing PHP as legacy "elitist", but big shops that use a lot of PHP are heavily investing in other tech (yes I look at FB).
> it's good language to deliver products.
Never said it was not. But it is not, anno 2021, a good language to start a new project in. Not as bad as Perl and COBOL, but still legacy.
It seems you have identified a lot with that language, and I see this often. Usually this happens to people who have little experience with other languages. The defend it like it is their home.
> It seems you have identified a lot with that language, and I see this often. Usually this happens to people who have little experience with other languages. The defend it like it is their home.
My take on this topic comes from extremely pragmatic and focused on results angle: delivering product. Not sure what about 2 sentences I wrote allows you to make broad assumptions about my experience, I don't feel need or desire do describe it here but it's not only my own opinion [0]
I think that Reddit "lolcontent" could be not good metric to use when deciding what should be used for building software.
> Not sure what about 2 sentences I wrote allows you to make broad assumptions about my experience
That you defend PHP like it is your home. We can deliver a product in Perl, but it's a bad choice these days. Unless... someone is reaaaaly well acquainted with Perl and little else.
Hence I suspect that's whats going on here. As I've seen this happen many times before, also outside of programming.
> allows you to make broad assumptions
I voiced my suspicion based on your defensiveness. That's all.
That's the same reason I don't watch news on TV, they're always covering negative stories about how politicians are corrupt, big organizations cheat the system, etc. I just don't feel like being more pessimistic than I already are.
I helped in the development of a microservice as a third party developer for a big lodgings reservation company.
The infrastructure team of the main company forced us to include Lombok and use it and the code was a mess. Too much automagically generated code that was hard to debug.
My company managed to deliver the microservice with enough quality, but I really hated the experience with Lombok, vanilla Java with the libraries needed for the task is more than enough (more control over your code).
