this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023
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My issue with PHP isn't the language, it's the developers. PHP developer culture is much like C# and Java culture.
I could bring a million reasons I don't want to program in PHP and every time we talk about it, the PHP developer tells me I should be using it for everything. If I suggest that it may not be the best tool for a particular task at hand, the PHP developer tells me it's the only language they know so they will use PHP.
The issue is that this type of culture closes doors mentally. In any craft, we should try to use the best tool available for the task at hand. In carpentry you'd use a hammer with nails and a screwdriver with screws. In programming, there are times using PHP makes sense and times it doesn't.
In container based services, I tend to lean toward a compiled binary because it reduces the size of the container at run time and most modern languages don't require tons of heavy duty frameworks to scale well there.
In a monolith, a fully interpreted language with an MVC framework could make sense.
I’ll never understand devs that go “I don’t know that language”. PHP is one of the only languages used in production I don’t know. I have read examples and it looks like you bastardized a Java/c# clone with bash or a string templating language, which isn’t very appealing. But like, if I had to learn it, I’d do so in a month, functionally writing it in a week tops. Learning languages is part of the job, and they all add something to your understanding of paradigms.
I think we need to keep in mind that a programming language isn't learned in a day whereas the use of most tools can be learnt within minutes, albeit not perfected of course.
The hurdle to learn a new language is higher and also there is only so many langauges you can be fluent in at the same time, until you start mixing stuff up and causing more problems for yourself than being proficient in just a few languages.
It's fine to not know every language. I'm not saying you must know every language. I'm saying that only knowing one and refusing to use another is a problem I've seen from PHP, Java, and C# cultures almost exclusively.
The only exception I'd say that makes sense is people who are using coding for a small part of their overall job. But full time software engineers should have at least a few options in their belt for backend that they understand and can use in different scenarios.