PHP is a great language

Last week, Eric Bailey tweeted:

Normal job: Change is inevitable, but I can adapt!

Development: I’ve been neglecting my family and friends for decades to stay on top of a 6 month cycle of 22 year-olds inadvertently reinventing PHP in a way that makes people somehow think that not knowing it makes me obsolete.

In response, Scott Jehl shared a tweet of his from last year:

modern web dev is an extreme overreaction to not liking some php

The weird thing, PHP is regularly attacked as “a shitty language,” and our profession goes out of its way to make JavaScript the one true language.

But PHP is great, and so many of the “hey look what we can do now!” features I’ve seen in people’s favorite JS frameworks are things PHP has been able to do for many, many years.

PHP has flaws, sure. All languages do.

But it has great documentation, tons of tooling, runs on pretty much any server, and it gets shit done. PHP is the workhorse of the web.

And while languages like Ruby have great “batteries included” defaults and Go is absurdly fast, PHP just keeps plugging along getting things done.

Long live PHP!