PHP's evolution since PHP 5 has been substantial, and I think this is a real problem. As someone who learned the language years ago, the pace of change (generics, attributes, match expressions, typed properties) makes modern codebases genuinely difficult to follow.
I suspect this affects many developers who cut their teeth on PHP but haven't kept up. The language has become a different beast, which is a strength for the community but a barrier to re-entry.
Most likely this can be said about a lot of languages, most languages are being maintained and improved. I am an hired expert in Java and I needed to explain some new languages features to some colleagues that have been introduced recently, I only mention them if they actually improve readability though.
I think PHP might be slightly different than other languages as a huge amount of people use this to create their first website as a hobby.
IMO, newer PHP is still very readable. I programmed with C++ for a decade, but I can safely say that I cannot understand a modern C++ code base anymore.
C hasn’t changed all that much, and someone who coded in C99 would take about 30mins to catch up to a modern C23 codebase’s changes. Famously so, as conservatism to change is the main friction in the community for about two decades now.
If you pull out examples of the earliest C, sure, it looks weird. But that C was already obsolete in 1989. Since then, it’s had a minor iteration (e.g. five-eight additions/modifications) every decade-ish (99, 11, 17, 23). Has it changed? Sure. Can it be compared to the iteration and speed of things like C#, Java, C++, etc? No way.
I think he's thinking more along the lines of PHP 5-8.5
That version 1-latest is understandingly highly different, but these are all decades old languages, which barely changed for some time, but are now all introducing new syntax.
Which I think makes sense, but it's obviously going to leave 9-5 devs behind that don't particularly care for coding and want to invest as little time as possible into their language knowledge.
TLDR: The PHP compiler isn't really suited for the job, it would introduce a lot of complexity to an already complex codebase and the memory/performance hit would be substantial.
I still love PHP. 23 years ago we created some encryption software for it and it is still going. I also run a PHP newsletter. There's still a strong community of people and whilst there are other languages which I also use (Python, Node.js) I still find myself gravitating towards PHP for fast and simple work
The only issues I have. is that this is a 'double edged sword' in that PHP has become far more complex since the launch of PHP 5 and so it isn't as easy to understand from scratch as it used to be
A lot of people are too proud to be associated with PHP. I am ready to admit that know nothing about the language except that a lot of people make cool things with it.
My favourite PHP product at the moment is BookStack (https://www.bookstackapp.com/), a really good wiki. I run an instance for my family and it's great.
But there are loads of things. And I notice that many of the sites I like using...are built on well maintained PHP stacks.
PHP is a very pleasant and straight-forward language to work with. I enjoyed my time working with it, though I did also see quite a lot of very poor code.
I think the danger with PHP is more its ability to easily cause *very bad things*.
This would partially be poor training (my University literally taught PHP with SQL-injectable examples), and I think the language itself making it very easy, such that less-experienced developers using it - most of them, early on - don't realise what's wrong until it's gone wrong.
With PHP being such an early tool online, and the above properties existing, it earned a reputation for being insecure and bad.
At least in my experience, the early years of PHP was lacking more enterprisey users; back then there was a small revolution when RoR came out and introduced the MVC pattern to a lot of (web) developers, who didn't have as opinionated a pattern / architecture up until then.
During that same period, there were a lot of mediocre tutorials and documentation online, including on the PHP website itself which allowed people in comments to post code examples, but as far as I know there wasn't a lot of moderation on those.
And finally, a lot of people ended up writing their own frameworks and the like, because they could. But also because there weren't any or not many good and widely adopted frameworks out there, that came later with first Zend Framework and then Laravel, the latter being the de-facto standard nowadays.
It's like walking on minefields with very different "mine densities"; when using something stricter, you would have one mine per acre, with PHP you would have ten.
For the longest time the language had been developed with this mentality that it's okay to continue running if something broke, that it's better to print out something than to do nothing and bail out.
Which means that for things to run reliably, you have to write very defensive code that checks everything you can think of. Which is probably a good idea with any language, but I find that old PHP requires much more of this.
Thankfully, they've been changing that over the past decade while still maintaining decent compatibility with old code. I just recently finished porting a pretty large project (~2 mil SLoC) from the ten year old 5.6 to the currently latest 8.4, and it's been pretty painless. The only things that broke were those that were never actually properly implemented and worked by pure chance.
Give me an example where PHP invites developers to do terrible things and I'll show you 2 other popular languages that invite equally bad or worse things :)
Or as Bjarne Stroustrup put it: There's two types of languages: The ones people complain about and the ones noone uses
The @ operator of php. In languages like Java, to silently catch all exceptions and do nothing with them requires at least some boiler plate.
PHP has an operator for something you should never do in a sane codebase.
You know that python wants good good to look good?
PHP was written in a way that makes bad code look good. And if we want Software Engineering to be a serious field that evolves, we have to be able to be honest with ourselves. It is a bad tool. Good programmers can even write good programs with bad tools. Doesn't mean you shouldn't avoid bad tools given the option.
There probably is a "PHP the good parts". But Javascript actually had a pretty nice core, and an utility of being in all web browsers that no other language could replicate. What niche does PHP have where it brings more value there other nicer languages can't be used instead?
You absolutely can use @ in sane codebases. And you give the example yourself: In other languages you often enough see that boilerplate where thrown exception is discarded, because there is no sane reaction to some edge case and you just want the program to continue, because you know it will work anyway. And that's @.
Note though that @ was already neutered in some earlier recent PHP releases.
The claim was "PHP invites bad code" - but your point is for "bad code can be written in PHP" which is really not the same thing. A quick google for the @ brought up https://stackoverflow.com/questions/136899/suppress-error-wi... where the highest voted response is ~"NO, don't use it please".
No use case I've come across during the past 10 years has required or even nudged me in the direction of @. It's an ancient relic that the whole community considers a no-no. I'd be curious if you really want to argue that this state of affairs "invites" using the @.
You can do crazy things in every language. However, in a language like Java, the crazy things are more conceptual (factory for factory of factories) and not basic things like what does == mean or problems with weak typing and implicit conversions. A lot of the issues with PHP can be avoided in modern PHP using things like strict_types=1, but most of the time, we don't get to work with projects using best practices. And I'd rather work with a bad Java project than any bad PHP project (which I have had the misfortune of maintaining).
Funny that you picked == as an example when == is very counter intuitive in Java and is one of the common pitfalls for beginners:
String a = new String();
String b = new String();
a = "test";
b = a + "";
if (a == "test")
{
// true
}
if (b == "test")
{
// false
}
if (a == b)
{
// false
}
Just like PHP, you have to read the docs to use it properly.
This is a decade-old PHP defence fallacy. No one says other languages have no problems, so "disproving" that is the fallacy. PHP just has far more problems and footguns. Maybe now it has fewer, but still. Far more.
So you're going to ignore the rest of what I wrote? I'll just assume you agree with me and the rest of my comment, but you don't want to admit it. Works for me.
I'd take PHP instead of JS/TS + framework-of-the-day on the backend anytime. Ok, PHP is usually also paired with a framework (cough Laravel cough), but at least there the situation is more stable, not to mention more mature. Unfortunately, I'm not the only one making the decisions...
A lot of C# and Java code is oriented towards web backends, too. Which are quite big and complex. So it seems natural that languages in the same design space (trad OO) converge on similar features. I think the only exception these days is Go.
I think these days you could change "You can write Fortran in any language" to "You can structure your code like Spring in any language"…
Still, even if it was "just" the web, why wouldn't it evolve? It's a great language, with a big user base, and there's always room for improvements and to increase the developer experience
I downvoted you before reading the fine article. I'm back to correct that.
The new array_first() and array_last() functions are nice, everything else is either reimplantation of existing features or "features"which will make maintainability more difficult. The pipe operator is one such example. I don't need it - these nested methods are not really an issue in any codebase I've seen. The new syntax only works for unary functions, so higher arity functions must be wrapped in an arrow function. It's a mess and more bug prone than just nesting the functions.
PHP should REALLY focus on getting the core stuff in shape.
Its still so annoying that you have to use mb_real_uppercase($name) for unicode. The other gripe is that the stdlib is SO messy. With PHP 5.3 they had a once in a lifetime opportunity to cleanup the stdlib and introduce a new namespaced API for builtins, and optionally introduce a uniform function call syntax:
"foo"->strtoupper();
Whenever doing PHP the time for concurrency will come sooner or later. Having no way of doing ANY concurrency is a letdown. The Fiber API does nothing on its own, and you are forced to use some third party runtime, that is usually a non-starter for legacy projects.
PHP has come a long way from the PHP 4.0 era, but is still lacking in multiple areas, and i dont see it being a pick for greenfield projects in 2025.
As for concurrency/async, it's possible to do requests in parallel with curl_multi_*. Other async/prallel things are also possible, but tend to be more complicated compared to JS or other languages with promise and async support.
That is an anti-pattern, since it suffers from shell meta-character injection (and argument injection). Since PHP has mkdir, you should use that instead. And pcntl_exec() is the correct API for running processes.
Why is it that all these languages like PHP, but also typescript are becoming like impossible puzzles to read. I find these generics, types and other language features very often causing complex software architecture. I see so many collegues these days struggling in understanding codebases. You almost need a PHD brain to be a frontend web developer.
I assume it is some inferiority complex, on many sides. PHP itself was laughed at being too simple, underpowered and inconsistent, now they overcorrected with types, annotations and breaking backwards compatibility with every release so that no old code base can remain intact. Frontend devs yearned to be regarded as real developers, which in their context means construction of unwieldly and overcomplex enterprise bullshit, thus typescript etc. And in the backend you have that same mechanism, devs having to prove they are no beginners and thus using (wrongly) design patterns, instructed by software architects, instead of avoiding abstraction and thus complexity.
I remember the discussions at the time about which filename extension to use - and I can not believe that .php3 won. I think that I was the first to bring up the subject for PHP 4, to use .php again and not include the version number.
PHP's evolution since PHP 5 has been substantial, and I think this is a real problem. As someone who learned the language years ago, the pace of change (generics, attributes, match expressions, typed properties) makes modern codebases genuinely difficult to follow.
I suspect this affects many developers who cut their teeth on PHP but haven't kept up. The language has become a different beast, which is a strength for the community but a barrier to re-entry.
Most likely this can be said about a lot of languages, most languages are being maintained and improved. I am an hired expert in Java and I needed to explain some new languages features to some colleagues that have been introduced recently, I only mention them if they actually improve readability though. I think PHP might be slightly different than other languages as a huge amount of people use this to create their first website as a hobby.
IMO, newer PHP is still very readable. I programmed with C++ for a decade, but I can safely say that I cannot understand a modern C++ code base anymore.
This is true for most languages though, compare C# 14 with C# 1.0, Java 25 with Java 1.0, C 23 (plus common compiler extensions) with K&R C,....
C hasn’t changed all that much, and someone who coded in C99 would take about 30mins to catch up to a modern C23 codebase’s changes. Famously so, as conservatism to change is the main friction in the community for about two decades now.
If you pull out examples of the earliest C, sure, it looks weird. But that C was already obsolete in 1989. Since then, it’s had a minor iteration (e.g. five-eight additions/modifications) every decade-ish (99, 11, 17, 23). Has it changed? Sure. Can it be compared to the iteration and speed of things like C#, Java, C++, etc? No way.
I think he's thinking more along the lines of PHP 5-8.5
That version 1-latest is understandingly highly different, but these are all decades old languages, which barely changed for some time, but are now all introducing new syntax.
Which I think makes sense, but it's obviously going to leave 9-5 devs behind that don't particularly care for coding and want to invest as little time as possible into their language knowledge.
I think PHP is way better now than it used to be. Learn PHP 8 and you are good to go.
PHP has no generics? I read somewhere that is was "too hard" to get right in PHP land, mostly because of how primitive the typesystem is.
If you're interested about generics in PHP, you can read this blog post by the PHP foundation: https://thephp.foundation/blog/2024/08/19/state-of-generics-... or this PR by Nikita: https://github.com/PHPGenerics/php-generics-rfc/issues/45.
TLDR: The PHP compiler isn't really suited for the job, it would introduce a lot of complexity to an already complex codebase and the memory/performance hit would be substantial.
I still love PHP. 23 years ago we created some encryption software for it and it is still going. I also run a PHP newsletter. There's still a strong community of people and whilst there are other languages which I also use (Python, Node.js) I still find myself gravitating towards PHP for fast and simple work
The only issues I have. is that this is a 'double edged sword' in that PHP has become far more complex since the launch of PHP 5 and so it isn't as easy to understand from scratch as it used to be
A lot of people are too proud to be associated with PHP. I am ready to admit that know nothing about the language except that a lot of people make cool things with it.
My favourite PHP product at the moment is BookStack (https://www.bookstackapp.com/), a really good wiki. I run an instance for my family and it's great.
But there are loads of things. And I notice that many of the sites I like using...are built on well maintained PHP stacks.
PHP is a very pleasant and straight-forward language to work with. I enjoyed my time working with it, though I did also see quite a lot of very poor code.
I think the danger with PHP is more its ability to easily cause *very bad things*.
This would partially be poor training (my University literally taught PHP with SQL-injectable examples), and I think the language itself making it very easy, such that less-experienced developers using it - most of them, early on - don't realise what's wrong until it's gone wrong.
With PHP being such an early tool online, and the above properties existing, it earned a reputation for being insecure and bad.
At least in my experience, the early years of PHP was lacking more enterprisey users; back then there was a small revolution when RoR came out and introduced the MVC pattern to a lot of (web) developers, who didn't have as opinionated a pattern / architecture up until then.
During that same period, there were a lot of mediocre tutorials and documentation online, including on the PHP website itself which allowed people in comments to post code examples, but as far as I know there wasn't a lot of moderation on those.
And finally, a lot of people ended up writing their own frameworks and the like, because they could. But also because there weren't any or not many good and widely adopted frameworks out there, that came later with first Zend Framework and then Laravel, the latter being the de-facto standard nowadays.
> I think the danger with PHP is more its ability to easily cause very bad things.
Is there any language where you can't?
It's like walking on minefields with very different "mine densities"; when using something stricter, you would have one mine per acre, with PHP you would have ten.
For the longest time the language had been developed with this mentality that it's okay to continue running if something broke, that it's better to print out something than to do nothing and bail out.
Which means that for things to run reliably, you have to write very defensive code that checks everything you can think of. Which is probably a good idea with any language, but I find that old PHP requires much more of this.
Thankfully, they've been changing that over the past decade while still maintaining decent compatibility with old code. I just recently finished porting a pretty large project (~2 mil SLoC) from the ten year old 5.6 to the currently latest 8.4, and it's been pretty painless. The only things that broke were those that were never actually properly implemented and worked by pure chance.
Probably not, but not most languages are not inviting to do them.
Give me an example where PHP invites developers to do terrible things and I'll show you 2 other popular languages that invite equally bad or worse things :)
Or as Bjarne Stroustrup put it: There's two types of languages: The ones people complain about and the ones noone uses
The @ operator of php. In languages like Java, to silently catch all exceptions and do nothing with them requires at least some boiler plate.
PHP has an operator for something you should never do in a sane codebase.
You know that python wants good good to look good?
PHP was written in a way that makes bad code look good. And if we want Software Engineering to be a serious field that evolves, we have to be able to be honest with ourselves. It is a bad tool. Good programmers can even write good programs with bad tools. Doesn't mean you shouldn't avoid bad tools given the option.
There probably is a "PHP the good parts". But Javascript actually had a pretty nice core, and an utility of being in all web browsers that no other language could replicate. What niche does PHP have where it brings more value there other nicer languages can't be used instead?
You absolutely can use @ in sane codebases. And you give the example yourself: In other languages you often enough see that boilerplate where thrown exception is discarded, because there is no sane reaction to some edge case and you just want the program to continue, because you know it will work anyway. And that's @.
Note though that @ was already neutered in some earlier recent PHP releases.
The claim was "PHP invites bad code" - but your point is for "bad code can be written in PHP" which is really not the same thing. A quick google for the @ brought up https://stackoverflow.com/questions/136899/suppress-error-wi... where the highest voted response is ~"NO, don't use it please". No use case I've come across during the past 10 years has required or even nudged me in the direction of @. It's an ancient relic that the whole community considers a no-no. I'd be curious if you really want to argue that this state of affairs "invites" using the @.
You can do crazy things in every language. However, in a language like Java, the crazy things are more conceptual (factory for factory of factories) and not basic things like what does == mean or problems with weak typing and implicit conversions. A lot of the issues with PHP can be avoided in modern PHP using things like strict_types=1, but most of the time, we don't get to work with projects using best practices. And I'd rather work with a bad Java project than any bad PHP project (which I have had the misfortune of maintaining).
Funny that you picked == as an example when == is very counter intuitive in Java and is one of the common pitfalls for beginners:
Just like PHP, you have to read the docs to use it properly.This is a decade-old PHP defence fallacy. No one says other languages have no problems, so "disproving" that is the fallacy. PHP just has far more problems and footguns. Maybe now it has fewer, but still. Far more.
So you're going to ignore the rest of what I wrote? I'll just assume you agree with me and the rest of my comment, but you don't want to admit it. Works for me.
I'd take PHP instead of JS/TS + framework-of-the-day on the backend anytime. Ok, PHP is usually also paired with a framework (cough Laravel cough), but at least there the situation is more stable, not to mention more mature. Unfortunately, I'm not the only one making the decisions...
PHP is a reasonable choice if you care about writing something that will still work out of the box 10 years from now.
But of course this assumes that you work with a team that can see a year ahead, let alone 10.
> A lot of people are too proud to be associated with PHP.
How so?
PHP becomes a complex language with each update. For what reason? Its application is still limited to the web, mostly.
A lot of C# and Java code is oriented towards web backends, too. Which are quite big and complex. So it seems natural that languages in the same design space (trad OO) converge on similar features. I think the only exception these days is Go.
I think these days you could change "You can write Fortran in any language" to "You can structure your code like Spring in any language"…
Obviously you haven't heard of NativePhp :)
Still, even if it was "just" the web, why wouldn't it evolve? It's a great language, with a big user base, and there's always room for improvements and to increase the developer experience
The web is not getting any simpler.
Exactly, I'd even argue that web development (back & front-end) is by far the largest job / industry in software development.
I downvoted you before reading the fine article. I'm back to correct that.
The new array_first() and array_last() functions are nice, everything else is either reimplantation of existing features or "features"which will make maintainability more difficult. The pipe operator is one such example. I don't need it - these nested methods are not really an issue in any codebase I've seen. The new syntax only works for unary functions, so higher arity functions must be wrapped in an arrow function. It's a mess and more bug prone than just nesting the functions.
> The pipe operator [...] syntax only works for unary functions, so higher arity functions must be wrapped in an arrow function.
It's coming - but to get PHP RFCs to pass they have to be salami-sliced, otherwise they're voted down.
https://wiki.php.net/rfc/partial_function_application_v2
PHP should REALLY focus on getting the core stuff in shape.
Its still so annoying that you have to use mb_real_uppercase($name) for unicode. The other gripe is that the stdlib is SO messy. With PHP 5.3 they had a once in a lifetime opportunity to cleanup the stdlib and introduce a new namespaced API for builtins, and optionally introduce a uniform function call syntax:
Whenever doing PHP the time for concurrency will come sooner or later. Having no way of doing ANY concurrency is a letdown. The Fiber API does nothing on its own, and you are forced to use some third party runtime, that is usually a non-starter for legacy projects.PHP has come a long way from the PHP 4.0 era, but is still lacking in multiple areas, and i dont see it being a pick for greenfield projects in 2025.
Yeah, the core ergonomics is significantly lagging behind most other backend languages despite improvements in some areas. I even wrote an article https://waspdev.com/articles/2025-06-12/my-honest-opinion-ab... .
As for concurrency/async, it's possible to do requests in parallel with curl_multi_*. Other async/prallel things are also possible, but tend to be more complicated compared to JS or other languages with promise and async support.
like in `mkdir $dirname`;
That is an anti-pattern, since it suffers from shell meta-character injection (and argument injection). Since PHP has mkdir, you should use that instead. And pcntl_exec() is the correct API for running processes.
The most exciting thing about the PHP8.5 announcement is the stability and maturity of PHP
When I look at the new pipe syntax ...
... I think why not just something like the following?The three dots in trim(...) make a callable out of a function, that was already in, so seem best to re-use that syntax, at least for now. [1]
As for the partial function application, there is already an RFC to add that, but it's not decided on as of now. [2]
1: https://www.php.net/manual/en/functions.first_class_callable...
2: https://wiki.php.net/rfc/partial_function_application_v2
PHP has really come a long way since I used it in the 90s on my first little website.
Looking forward for true async to land - nothing here gets me too excited.
in 2025 developers who are programming in PHP should still deal with str_replace, htmlspecialchars, nl2br (the list goes on and on).
(no, I don't want my IDE babysitting me, and ideally I don't want to use IDE at all)
Why is it that all these languages like PHP, but also typescript are becoming like impossible puzzles to read. I find these generics, types and other language features very often causing complex software architecture. I see so many collegues these days struggling in understanding codebases. You almost need a PHD brain to be a frontend web developer.
I assume it is some inferiority complex, on many sides. PHP itself was laughed at being too simple, underpowered and inconsistent, now they overcorrected with types, annotations and breaking backwards compatibility with every release so that no old code base can remain intact. Frontend devs yearned to be regarded as real developers, which in their context means construction of unwieldly and overcomplex enterprise bullshit, thus typescript etc. And in the backend you have that same mechanism, devs having to prove they are no beginners and thus using (wrongly) design patterns, instructed by software architects, instead of avoiding abstraction and thus complexity.
No, I'm not bitter.
Thanks PHP for bringing pipe operator in 2025.
still remember been on #php with count down to php3 announcement
I remember the discussions at the time about which filename extension to use - and I can not believe that .php3 won. I think that I was the first to bring up the subject for PHP 4, to use .php again and not include the version number.
tl;dr: nothing interesting, just stability and maturity
And a pipe operator, which is also being discussed in a number of other languages.