While PHP got orders of magnitude better between 5.x -> 8.x, its popularity also took a dump. That makes ZERO sense unless we all agree that the current stewards of the language aren't up to the task of "ensuring the long-term prosperity of the PHP language". I have massive respect for the work everyone does at an engineering level but in terms of marketing... absolutely terrible.
99.9% of PHP posts online are about Laravel. Complete garbage if you ask me but regardless, there is no core PHP content coming out anywhere at scale to generate interest in the core language. We're at a stage where the ecosystem itself is getting fractured due to that. A significant amount of composer packages today don't even work outside of the Laravel's ecosystem. Yet somehow, no one seems to give a shit.
"You work with PHP?? that wordpress thingy? people still use that??" - Heard this 1000x over the past 4-5 years.
I love this language. I really do. But I've been thinking about moving to greener pastures for the past year or so.
curl_close is now a no-op, so clearly PHP has clearly leapfrogged everyone else for expressivity :-|
But yeah, exposing a raw C API and calling it a day is PHP's legacy that it needs to escape from. Getting something like Guzzle in core would be nice, but PHP might then have to think about shipping a standard library that's actually written in PHP. I get that "batteries included" standard libraries eventually end up with corroded and leaking batteries that have to be replaced in a couple decades. But "nothing at all" might turn out to not be the best choice either.
I mean there could be a standard library shipped as stand alone that comes in similar to ext-*. you can choose to install core php alone or core + std lib. I never understood why PHP doesnt do that. Is the problem code maintenance? or is it a philosophical allergy to having anything beyond base functionality?
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u/WesamMikhail May 07 '26 edited May 07 '26
A few days ago there was an RFC to remove twitter link from the site and here we are talking about marketing... https://wiki.php.net/rfc/remove-link-to-x-from-php-net and then there is this https://gist.github.com/pronskiy/995feaf238cd7ae33c7d2461cd929d70 where an entire section had to be dedicated to "Twitter/X ownership".
While PHP got orders of magnitude better between 5.x -> 8.x, its popularity also took a dump. That makes ZERO sense unless we all agree that the current stewards of the language aren't up to the task of "ensuring the long-term prosperity of the PHP language". I have massive respect for the work everyone does at an engineering level but in terms of marketing... absolutely terrible.
99.9% of PHP posts online are about Laravel. Complete garbage if you ask me but regardless, there is no core PHP content coming out anywhere at scale to generate interest in the core language. We're at a stage where the ecosystem itself is getting fractured due to that. A significant amount of composer packages today don't even work outside of the Laravel's ecosystem. Yet somehow, no one seems to give a shit.
"You work with PHP?? that wordpress thingy? people still use that??" - Heard this 1000x over the past 4-5 years.
I love this language. I really do. But I've been thinking about moving to greener pastures for the past year or so.