PHP in 2019 - Hackdot

Re:PHP in 2019 by cbdumas on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @12:05PM (#19920759)

Often when there is a post about PHP I read over these treads sort of subtly trying to figure out how a language with such a large user base has remained basically invisible to me. And I don't think I live in the HN bubble, though I do use a lot of Python, in my consulting work I've also done plenty of work with .NET, JVM to a lesser extent and other "boring" tech.

But PHP has literally never come up, even as a suggestion or as a tool that is a small part of the company stack or whatever. It feels like I'm looking into a strange parallel universe of software development reading through these threads. PHP devs, where are you?

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Re:PHP in 2019 by DCoder on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @01:21PM (#19921647)

Right here! PHP and JS/TS is what I do every day.

PHP has its tentacles all over the web: WordPress and Drupal are immensely popular for simplistic sites and short-lived promotionals, Magento and WooCommerce attract many e-commerce users, and Symfony/Laravel handle the custom stuff. I've worked with all of these and have the scars to show for it.

All popular projects have swarms of consultants offering advice, prebuilt additions, and custom development. (E.g. WordPress plugins and themes are everywhere.) This is also a significant factor for the penny-pinching customer — from their point of view, they avoid vendor lock-in and expensive development this way. (Spoiler: it rarely works out, in the end. "Tower of Babylon" and "shallow learning curve" mix in very exciting ways.) So there are masses of people who know the basics of PHP and call themselves "PHP developers". In my opinion, just a fraction of them actually deserves that title.

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Re:PHP in 2019 by cbdumas on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @01:36PM (#19921803)

So I get the sense that PHP is sort of the tool of choice for web development at small or medium businesses which are not primarily software businesses, but are looking to create a website and maybe do some ecommerce? Is that right? If so I guess it makes sense that I wouldn't have seen it, most of my consulting work has been at relatively large enterprises.

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Re:PHP in 2019 by hnick on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @09:20PM (#19925334)

Pretty much any shared hosting service (which is the default for a small business not going for a more handheld hosted solution like Squarespace or Shopify) is cPanel enabled with PHP, MySQL (via phpMyAdmin), one-click Wordpress installation, and other similar features.

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Re:PHP in 2019 by DCoder on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @02:09PM (#19922100)

It definitely feels that way, yes. I've mostly dealt with small businesses looking for the lowest bidder and medium businesses unable to spend a fortune on software licenses and highly-experienced devs, and PHP fits that segment well.

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Re:PHP in 2019 by chx on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @02:07PM (#19922085)

> [WordPress and] Drupal are immensely popular for simplistic sites

That's not a sentence I expected to see. Ever. Drupal is popular for many things but for simplistic sites?

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Re:PHP in 2019 by DCoder on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @02:14PM (#19922145)

This may be a regional thing. I've seen Drupal 6/7 on a lot of sites where the original dev threw together five content types in the admin GUI and told the admin how to post new content. It worked well and was certainly less worrisome than seeing (outdated) WordPress.

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Re:PHP in 2019 by blowski on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @04:29PM (#19923433)

We run about 1,000 simple websites off the same Drupal codebase. Custom forms, page layouts, etc.

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Re:PHP in 2019 by chx on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @09:18PM (#19925322)

So your argument is that a multisite project running a thousand sites off the same codebase containing custom forms and layouts is simplistic? Then, I pray, what do you call complex?

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Re:PHP in 2019 by slenk on Thursday May 16, 2019 @12:00AM (#19926026)

Maintaining 1000 servers

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Re:PHP in 2019 by Kluny on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @12:59PM (#19921390)

Right here! Started working for a PHP shop straight out of college, and have never been able to get hired for anything else since then.

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Re:PHP in 2019 by n42 on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @01:31PM (#19921754)

ever heard of Facebook? Slack? Etsy? WeWork? Box? Yelp? just to name a few.

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Re:PHP in 2019 by verbify on Thursday May 16, 2019 @03:27AM (#19926893)

Or mediawiki

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Re:PHP in 2019 by oo0shiny on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @12:14PM (#19920864)

Right here! Drupal has been moving into the enterprise sector with their latest release (v8, built on Symfony). I get a lot of interest from recruiters based on my Drupal background, especially lately.

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Re:PHP in 2019 by dennispeach on Wednesday May 15, 2019 @05:25PM (#19923922)

Here’s one right here!

In the world I’m in and the journey I’ve taken in my career of being in digital/dev for 10+ years, PHP is what I have based my dev foundations on. (albeit web rather than software)

I am recruiting PHP developers for my team now, and they are out there, but maybe not here?!

We make websites, and not a tremendous amount beyond that bar a few Laravel apps.

I suspect we travel in totally different worlds?!

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