This is just intellectually dishonest. It completely depends on whether your libraries have breaking changes and how your app is structured. Many legacy projects use old versions of ORMs and frameworks that don't support PHP 8. So now you're also upgrading code igniter and you're looking at hundreds of files that call it's ORM

No. If we're talking about tech debt (that's not what parent was talking about by the way) then JS is a magnitude worse. Running old projects from JS ecosystem can require multiple miracles, not only code refactoring.

And your example, codeigniter, is one of the worst examples in PHP.

Not only it is a framework that has minor usage: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=codeigniter,larav...

It is infamous for being hard to upgrade. No responsible PHP developer would start a complex project in it today.

A typical PHP project in the last years use either Laravel or Symfony.

Not to mention PHP has mature tooling to perform automated code upgrade between versions: https://github.com/rectorphp/rector

The project I mentioned was 4 years old and so far no code change was required between PHP 7.2 and PHP 8.3.

And again, my parent was clearly talking about server upgrade: "was alway easier just to build a new server".

And the change I had to do was not even multiple lines, it was a single line in a Dockerfile. I found the Pull Request and it was from 7.4 to 8.3:

https://i.imgur.com/MmemYSp.png

Nobody said js wasn't worse, just that your experience is not the experience of most PHP upgrades.

Saying Code Igniter is not used in a lot of places because of Google trends is wrong for a lot of reasons, but the biggest of which being your graph shows laravel and codeigniter neck and neck a decade ago. Who cares whether new projects are started in code igniter? PHP is mostly legacy apps, and there are other frameworks with similar nightmare stories.

Again, JS is bad too, but we have to completely rewrite sites due to some PHP framework upgrades because PHP let's people do really dumb ORM templating.

I have no idea what you're referring to with your distinction between tech debt and server upgrades. I'm talking about server upgrades, clearly. I'm just saying if you upgrade PHP on an old project chances are things will break. This happens with Laravel and Slim too.

> PHP let's people do really dumb ORM templating.

PHP has nothing to do with ORM problems. Any language allows dumb stuff related to ORM. Those are the libraries rather than the language.

PHP, like any language, has good and bad libraries.

If a project uses a bad solution for ORM, the language is not to blame.

I can do dumb ORM stuff in C#, Java, Rust, C++ and Python.

If a project picked a bad framework 10 years ago and now complains about the language instead of the framework I don't know what to tell you.

Then it sounds like we disagree on what the thread is about. When I hear "I updated PHP and everything broke" I think "because libraries break between version upgrades." You seem to be arguing against a position that people aren't taking, which is that there's something inherently wrong with PHP as a language that makes it break when upgraded (which nobody has said).

The same goes for Node, which doesn't break servers just because you upgrade it. I have updated from 12 to 20 with no problems because of the dependencies.

How is this not a complain about the language?

> Again, JS is bad too, but we have to completely rewrite sites due to some PHP framework upgrades because PHP let's people do really dumb ORM templating.

I even quoted this part specifically in my reply:

> because PHP let's people do really dumb ORM templating.

You misunderstand me, I'm saying it has as much to do with PHP as it has to do with JS. Node doesn't break on upgrade because of JS, it breaks because of dependencies that don't work on new versions, as does PHP.

it was when I had to move php5 to php7 5-6 years back, and if I remember correctly a few OS libs didn't support php7 so that was really hard. Was faster to build a new VPS, since no big DB or storage was easier.

You might have had a smooth experience, and happy for you. But PHP didn't have, maybe it does now, such a good version manager as NVM.

But yeah we also had once where all the way back where we didn't do it with NVM and that was a pain in the ass.