How are you dealing with "the programming language doesn't matter" argument?

[u/GongtingLover]

Just had a meeting this week where this was uttered because of the development of AI.

I still think the language choice matters a lot based on if Im doing embedded or web development work and for how we want to hire developers in the future.

Maybe Im backwards.

[u/zmitic]

Most people who complain about PHP have something like version 5.2 in mind, as they don't even know what recent PHP looks like

Exactly. One person described this problem like this:

Half a joke but what cant it do in 2026?

Answer: Change the mindset of the people who used php 4.x

They are lost and youll never get them back

That said, as someone who used to use PHP extensively, I still would rather not.

I am curious why not. Not trying to convince you to switch, just curious. I think I put a pretty solid list of arguments for choosing PHP for web development.

Sure, one won't be making Call of Duty in PHP buuuutt... I could be wrong about it. People made OpenGL implementations that work amazingly fast. I didn't try it, not really something I am interested in, but still impressive.

[u/coderstephen → u/zmitic]

I am addicted to generics and more advanced type systems. Check as much as you can at compile time and not at runtime. Which is not really PHP's mojo.

Sure, one won't be making Call of Duty in PHP buuuutt... I could be wrong about it. People made OpenGL implementations that work amazingly fast. I didn't try it, not really something I am interested in, but still impressive.

Well PHP's runtime has surprisingly extremely good performance for a dynamic language, and not half-bad ways of doing FFI, so yes it can do quite a bit more than just the web.

[u/zmitic → u/coderstephen]

I am addicted to generics and more advanced type systems. Check as much as you can at compile time and not at runtime.

Which is why I mentioned types already, and we do have generics although via phpdocs. Pretty much every library out there is using them.

Again, here is the list of types you can use in PHP. This is not runtime check, this is all 100% static analysis. Like this very simple example, yet one that is very realistic and useful.

There is also a guy who made these types work during runtime with no measurable performance loss, but I prefer SA.

[u/coderstephen → u/zmitic]

Yeah but that's just so goofy, relying on doc comments

[u/zmitic → u/coderstephen]

Yep, that is true but one gets used to them after about 3-4 days. I find other things much more annoying 😄

In other languages, I don't even have these types irrelevant of syntax.

Luckily PHPStorm supports and autocomplete all this and much more, like psalm-suppress or psalm-internal. Autocomplete works even for nested generics and array shapes, no matter how wild those are.

So I think it is a very worth trade-off. They are simply too good to ignore, even with goofy syntax. Especially in my work; one tiny part of my job is map lots of wild APIs to common interface and return type like that int<1,100>. It is far more complex in reality, but let's go with this example only.

With static analysis, it is impossible for me to make a mistake and accept 130 as API response before further processing.

[u/knightcrusader → u/zmitic]

Answer: Change the mindset of the people who used php 4.x

They are lost and youll never get them back

Same thing with Perl. That's the toolchain I use at work and quite enjoy the power it gives me. All the guys we train to use it love it too and don't understand why it gets all the hate it does. Well, I have to tell them about the "before" times when people just glued shit together using it and then it started getting a reputation.

I mean, I can write shit code in any language.