this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2025
1073 points (98.6% liked)

Programmer Humor

25484 readers
1973 users here now

Welcome to Programmer Humor!

This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!

For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.

Rules

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Source.

Yep, PHP is turning 30 this year! Wondering if "PHP is still relevant?" Ever since we have been hearing that PHP is dead. It was “dead” 10 years ago, 5 years ago, and “is dead” today. But somehow - it isn’t. Anyway... happy birthday!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] balsoft@lemmy.ml 13 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

PHP is far from "least bad language". Nowadays it is an ok language, one of many. You can also write ok code in it. The main issue is that it's really easy to write horrible shit that just barely works and will break when you look at it wrong. In fact without a lot of knowledge and experience that is the code you will probably write.

There are much better languages for any webdev niche you can think of, and some that are just better for webdev overall (e.g. Elixir). The reason PHP is still relevant is mostly huge legacy codebases that require a lot of engineering power to maintain (because PHP is not a good language for maintenance).

The way I look at it is that PHP is the C++ of webdev (but slightly worse).