Big websites used PHP in the distant past and have a handful of lines running today. PHP is eating the world!
Come on man, you're well aware none of those "web scale" companies are running major portions of their sites on PHP anymore. Well, you should be aware of that.
You can keep fighting for PHP if you want. Don't pretend that it's worse is better nature fifteen years ago somehow made it a good language or that it didn't have major failings.
I wrote a ton of PHP 3 through 5. It was easier to deploy on $10 shared hosting than Perl/CGI and more capable than SSI. That was about it in terms of its advantages at the time. It wasn't easier to write than Perl and in fact had more and less obvious footguns. It's database access was shaky at best and downright dangerous at worst.
The question today is why bother with PHP for greenfield development? It doesn't really offer anything unique or special. You can't really leverage your PHP skills anywhere but web development and really only a subset of that field. So good luck with that.
What I actually said was PHP 5 was "fine". To that I'll add the wildly controversial assertions that PHP 7 is "pretty good" and PHP 8 "looks nice".
I know that I'm supposed to have internalized that PHP Is Bad, but occasionally I have to do maintenance on a PHP project and I just can't find it within me to hate it.
> It was easier to deploy on $10 shared hosting than Perl/CGI and more capable than SSI.
Exactly. And for other folks who (unlike us) didn't use PHP at the time, the "Virtues of PHP" section of this Slack post that lists other notable reasons why people chose (and still might?) PHP: https://slack.engineering/taking-php-seriously/
is there any cli for scaffolding a site that includes auth, caching, sessions, queues, teams, profile, 2-factor, rbac (via policies), migrations, asset management via webpack with low-to-no config... (sure this is just for laravel, but that's a huge subset of users, just as django/rails are for python/ruby)
Even rails doesn't have auth baked in. For launching something fast, nothing beats prototyping in laravel. For more heavy work-loads you can offload services to go or rust for data intensive things, and still keep the majority of the code/api.
For new devs especially, community matters more than just about anything. While, wordpress is a clusterfuck of security issues, vulnerabilities, and bad practices the laravel community and (symfony which is more for enterprise apps) are generally top notch.
Show me how you can bootstrap a full SaaS app w/ all the same features as:
laravel new myapp --jet --teams
In ANY language without using some sort of cookiecutter template, or something that is custom-brewed.
Come on man, you're well aware none of those "web scale" companies are running major portions of their sites on PHP anymore. Well, you should be aware of that.
You can keep fighting for PHP if you want. Don't pretend that it's worse is better nature fifteen years ago somehow made it a good language or that it didn't have major failings.
I wrote a ton of PHP 3 through 5. It was easier to deploy on $10 shared hosting than Perl/CGI and more capable than SSI. That was about it in terms of its advantages at the time. It wasn't easier to write than Perl and in fact had more and less obvious footguns. It's database access was shaky at best and downright dangerous at worst.
The question today is why bother with PHP for greenfield development? It doesn't really offer anything unique or special. You can't really leverage your PHP skills anywhere but web development and really only a subset of that field. So good luck with that.