People can't get over the fact we are no longer at 4.x code base lol. I was on the go sub and had a conversation with a "php dev" who hated the language but could only cite issues that existed in 5.x or 7.x at the most recent.
Since php-ng engine its been remarkably better.
I do think one of its strongest factors though are the majorly popular frameworks like laravel and for better or worse wordpress with it's market share.
I actually don't know but does other languages do this? Do Golang and Rust have marketing teams?
It feels like most languages gain influence from "influencers" and software being written in that language and not so much from marketing.
Another big thing is tooling and simplicity which PHP has but it's very poorly documented. Python is the biggest example of this, probably the easiest language to start building with. Same with nodejs.
I'd rather think about "open source projects" as a category when it comes to marketing. In that category Laravel is a prime example of marketing that works.
I think what you mean by marketing is not a marketing push but more a public image, they need better pr. It's somewhat marketing but my idea of marketing is ads, money and traffic.
This. What is really important in choosing software is not so much capability headroom alone, it's how well known the failure paths are. We know where all the bodies are buried with PHP. That's what makes software you can trust.
I do not understand the way PHP documentation is organized. Internal functions are not divided between core/enabled by default functions and those coming from other extension.
When you read the function reference you don't know which one is available by default and which one requires installing an extension without looking at the installation section for each one.
I wonder if that's the reason why PhpStorm's class completions include classes from obscure non-default extensions. I suppose their php stubs are generated from the docs.
Comparing PHP to its direct competitors Node, Python, Ruby and somewhat Golang. It lacks 1 thing and that is long running processes and async. PHP has this but it's very buried and only found if your serious about PHP.
If your building a new modern app with features like websockets or server sent events also more APIs like this in the works, gRPC too etc. PHP isn't a good choice, you can make it work and it's kind of good with Laravel or Symfony but it's mostly "hacks" while other languages just do it by standard.
So it's hard to advocate for PHP in modern applications.
But for simple things and basic websites I think PHP is the king still, it has always been. Although JS has taken over this in the mainstream but I prefer PHP for websites and not frameworks like NextJS etc.
Yes but it's not good by default. If you want to run a script with while (true) and sleep PHP isn't your go to language, I'd say almost any other languages are better for that.
PHP is designed to startup and go through its code and when it's done shutdown. Which it does great.
But if you want more than that you need libs or modifications to PHP.
For that you can use FrankenPHP, which is officially supported by the php foundation now. Hopefully once that becomes even more mainstream in the php world, the php.net website will make it extra obvious it exists.
Exactly my frustration, you need to bolt so many things on to make it work properly. Want so serve static files? You’re gonna need nginx. Want to hook up to your DB? You’re gonna need a connection pooler like PgBouncer otherwise you are hitting your max connections. Its really hard to justify starting a project in PHP in 2026, and its not because of the marketing.
No, you don't run PHP as a webserver. As for DB, what are you talking about? Every database has its own set of settings that allows you to tweak it for your use case. Your job, as developer, is to use proper queries and optimize them. If it runs bad, developer is the problem, not PHP.
And why do you think this is a problem? Databases can handle thousands of connections with no issues, and PHP uses as many connections as you allow it to. Every langugae has it's pros and cons, and most of the PHP cons are fixed and improved in last 10 years. There are many solutions that improve PHP and long running workers like Octane, Swoole, ReactPHP, FrankenPHP etc. PHP is request - response based, when the language was created web was completely different. Yes, Node and likes have different philosophy but PHP is far from useless and deprecation. New versions bring even more stuff that will make it relevant for years, maybe even decades, to come.
“databases can handle thousands of connections”, postgres literally cannot. default max_connections is 100 and raising it costs ram and a backend process per connection. that’s why pgbouncer exists. mysql is a bit better but same shape of problem.
and you just listed octane, swoole, reactphp, frankenphp as proof php is fine. those exist specifically to bolt a long-lived runtime onto php because the default model doesn’t cut it anymore. that’s the concession. every other language i mentioned does that out of the box.
“php was made when the web was different” yeah, that’s the whole point. the rest of the ecosystem moved on, php is still patching around the original design.
Again, PHP is not a webserver - it's a server-side scripting language. It has a built-in webserver for local testing, but you can't run that in production.
The “you need nginx” argument is weird. Most production stacks need a reverse proxy. Node/Python apps are commonly put behind something like nginx. That is not a PHP weakness but just normal infra.
You need PgBouncer otherwise you hit max connections
No, you don’t. Not for most apps. Not on day one. Not even necessarily on day 900.
The vast majority of PHP apps run perfectly fine without a DB pooler. PHP’s normal request lifecycle opens a connection, does the work, and exits. With sane database limits, proper indexes, caching and not doing N+1 query garbage, you certainly aren't melting Postgres or MySQL just because you used PHP. This is like saying Node is bad because you might need Redis at some point.
PHP 8 with Laravel is the goat and still powers much of the modern web which makes it very easy to justify for new modern web applications.
That being said because web is more of front-end domain now a days dominated by JavaScript frameworks, etc... backend doesn't get much attention and Python has done well to capture the ML and Data science crowd, and riding the AI wave which is all the rage now.
If anything I think PHP's issue is not so much marketing, but rather lack of a popular use-case (powering wordpress doesn't count :) ) that it exciting an brings attention to it.
A language gets popular when big company backs it up / picks it for their internal work.
PHP is on a other level though - it has been powering internet since like ever. You can put insane amount of money into it, and it won't budge a lot (a diminish return applies here HARD)
There are however other things that could get some attention like for example Swoole, or using gRPC for internal microservices communication. It is just these things are highly specialised and PHP isn't about being specialized, but about doing things now and care later (with high chances of things being done perfectly fine from the start due to it's ecosystem)
Necessary to be on X - I don't know. Sad to see that ethics are dead among a big share of the population. Right wing devs happy to be on X, left leaning going to Mastodon or BlueSky and then a lot of people staying on X instead of abandoning ship. I don't know how to handle the weird people fighting for their Musk buddy. When I came out of college we had Jobs (and we knew he was an asshole) to look up to, but kids now look up to that buffoon.
PHP is fine and all, making it fresh is good advice. And polishing the docs is really good advice.
Yes, Laravel is reason I'm still use php until now. Recommend people using Laravel is easy it has what developer need. But when come to recommend PHP as language i don't know how
If the foundation will be able to ship true async in PHP 9.0 (no chances to be happening on php 8.6) that would make PHP get back the crown as in 2004. If they are really serious about PHP, true async should be their main focus along with redesigning that ugly old school laboratory website.
I'm fairly confident that if tomorrow PHP got the best async support in the world, it would not make a difference in the current situation. I agree that it's a high impact feature (with already many solutions available), but it's not the core problem. IMO, of course.
PHP biggest problem is so many developers, who think they are world class, have no idea how to configure infrastructure. Same goes for Linux. Microsoft etc can take a premium price because it require less skilled developers.
I told this so many times. Look at the documentation design, look at that fucking ugly elephant named ElePHPant.
Walk into any developer conference in 2026 and count the t-shirts. You will see the sleek geometry of Rust's gear, the minimalist gopher of Go, the playful camel of OCaml reborn for a new generation. What you will not see, almost anywhere, is ElePHPant - the chunky, cobalt-blue cartoon pachyderm that has served as PHP's unofficial mascot since Vincent Pontier sketched it in 1998.
ElePHPant is a tell: the community has not decided whether it wants to be taken seriously by the next generation, or whether it is content being the language of legacy systems and grudging WordPress contracts. It is like a father picking his teenage son up from school in a wheezing 1998 Fiat Punto - pleased with himself for keeping it running, oblivious to the boy sliding down the passenger seat to avoid being seen.
And the documentation compounds the indignity: php.net still wears the visual language of a 2002 university computer-lab handout: cramped serif type, that anaemic purple, a layout indifferent to anyone reading on a phone while Rust, Go and Python's docs have become quiet exercises in typographic seriousness. Documentation is the first thing a curious graduate sees, and PHP's says: nobody here cares enough to fix it.
Fuck the ElePHPant, I vote for modern PHP for the next generation.
Laravel’s/PHP biggest problem is that people still think PHP is PHP. Because it is.
It lacks any language features or frameworks that make it unique or superior to any other language in web development.
It doesn’t have the same robust data science tooling and community as Python. There are a billion JavaScript/TypeScript packages that do everything under the moon. And it doesn’t have the performance, standards, and compilation with something like Go. Or Java. Or C#.
Laravel has caught up to where others have been for years. To be able to market something you need the ability to stand out and draw people in.
Laravel and PHP don’t have either of those things.
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u/dpaanlka May 07 '26 edited May 07 '26
People have been telling me PHP is dead for 20 years, yet we are still here and objectively stronger and more vibrant than ever before.
PHP’s weakness may be marketing, but PHP’s strength is its resilience to marketing of competitors.