I don’t know if it’s due to over-exposure to programming memes but I certainly believed that no one was starting new PHP projects in 2023 (or 2020, or 2018, or 2012…). I was under the impression we only still discussed it at all because WordPress is still around.
Would a PHP evangelist like to disabuse me of my notions and make an argument for using PHP for projects such as Kbin in this day and age?
Having spent my college years writing dozens of Node apps, when I got a job writing PHP I actually loved it. It was weird at first, the syntax looks old and gross, and it certainly doesn’t have the sex-appeal. That being said, I didn’t have to spend hours setting up an environment, I didn’t have to think much about how to pull in packages, and concurrency via async/await made my life so much easier. The just-copy-everything mentality also meant I could basically never make a mistake ;)
I write C++ (for games) now and often wish things were as easy as when I wrote PHP.
Ease of use + networked nature was the bane of PHP in term of security. Everyone and their grandma wanted to make a php site but they weren’t exposed to potential vulnerabilities they could make. Which is why php in part has a notoriety to be vulnerable - a lot of people used it, some made mistakes, so there were many vulnerable code bases.