Meh, as far as I can see PHP has a ton of very active development around web services and frameworks, which is its core value proposition. PHP as a language should probably slow down in general but the people who use it don't seem to be really dying out or slowing down as much as the bubble leads us to believe.
People hate php for no reason. They talk about performance or whatever while building rest crud apps. Literally any language can handle that easily and your bottleneck is usually the database. I've scaled startups on PHP to hundreds of thousands of users running on a few cheap ec2 instances. But no one wants to build new php projects instead focusing on Go, Python, or Ruby. I honestly don't get it. PHP devs earn less. The syntax is super easy to pick up. Don't you want cheaper labor?
I've started to learn the ecosystems of the other languages. It's all the same shit. Really.
I think most people experienced PHP as the guilty party behind a lot of really, really terrible LAMP stack projects, but most of the time it was because mod_php was serving requests.
I used PHP to run some service workers managed with supervisord and it was fine. I just get annoyed with the class-based hierarchy but I'd guess they've evolved since 2017 or whenever I used it last.
I think php has a gentler learning curve, but you still need the same level of expertise to get something decent out of the door. From the recruiting side it's still a PITA to find good engineers and it's reflected in the final cost of hiring. I might be biased, but moving jobs every now and then had more impact than doing php or ruby (the other contender would be nodejs, I think go and python tend to be used on different purposes or complementary to the web stack)
I’ve written PHP off and on since the .php3 extension was a thing. People had very good reasons to hate PHP then. It’s greatly improved, but largely due to the composer ecosystem helping to paper over the worse bits. The global functions are still an awful mess.
Composer’s means of including packages doesn’t do the language any favours imo — it doubles down on namespaces (and complex PSR 4/7 ones at that) and the cli isn’t particularly intuitive.
To me, what PHP needs is a simple module system with scoped functions and variables, an object literal syntax rather than `new \stdClass`, and first-class simple to use threading/async/promises for concurrent requests and IO.
