So when I started programming in 2001, it was du jour in the communities I participated in to be highly critical of other languages. Other languages sucked, the people using them were losers or stupid, if they would just use a real language, such as the one we used, everything would just be better.
Right?
This sort of culturally-encoded language was really prevalent around condemning PHP and Java. Developers in these languages were actively referred to as less competent than developers in the other, more blessed languages.
And at the time, as a new developer, I internalised this pretty heavily. The language I was in was blessed, obviously, not because I was using it but because it was better designed than a language like PHP, less wordy and annoying than Java, more flexible than many other options.
It didn’t matter that it was (and remains) difficult to read, it was that we were better for using it.
I repeated this pattern for a really long time, and as I learned new languages and patterns I’d repeat the same behaviour in those new environments. I was almost certainly not that fun to be around, a microcosm of the broader unpleasantness in tech.
At least, until I got called on it.
As someone who has written a lot of PHP professionally over the last ~13 years (and a fair bit of other languages - JS, Rust, C++, Python … I try to reach for whatever solution fits the problem) I feel your frustration with some things but wanted to point out that some of those things that have changed heavily in just the last 4-5 years. Apologies in advance for the wall of text, lol:
That’s still pretty valid. XDebug is still utter garbage to work with in my opinion. I wish it were better. That said, I haven’t tried actually using it in several years so it could be better and I just don’t know about it.
Zend hasn’t really been industry-relevant in some 12-13 years, and yeah … it was super rough. I basically hated every line of Zend code I ever wrote.
That said… the same kind of thing is true for a lot of languages. To use Python sensibly (for web, anyway…) you have to learn Flask or Django. To use Rust sensibly you have to learn Actix, Warp, Axum, or Tide. To use JS sensibly, you have to learn React or Vue or Svelte or Alpine or any of the thousand frameworks that come out for it daily.
For PHP the big ones are Laravel, Symfony (Laravel uses a fair bit of it under the hood), CodeIgniter, and CakePHP.
The most popular framework over the last decade or so is Laravel, and it’s also my favorite. So I’m assuming that’s the one you mean. And… yeah, even modern PHP wouldn’t really be worth writing without it in my opinion. It focuses hugely on developer experience, greasing the wheels in huge ways and eliminating loads of boilerplate both in-app and in its tooling. It is SO SO SO SO SO MUCH BETTER than the others in my personal opinion. Genuinely transformative to the PHP experience, tries to make things as frustration-free as it can.
There are of course many rather valid criticisms of it - Mostly around how being “batteries included” means it’s rather opinionated. Using Laravel means you either do things the Laravel way or you struggle… but with how much it simplifies, it winds up being worth learning to do things the Laravel way in my experience.
For raw PHP in general … yeah. again, I agree. Yet again though, that’s also true for lots of other languages (explain a segfault to a C++ beginner), and thankfully Laravel includes a very detailed and helpful stack trace and debugging page - Any thrown exception will result in a page like this with an interactive stack trace:
I think Symfony, CodeIgniter, and CakePHP all include something similar these days.
Patterns are a preference thing, I realize it’s not for everyone. I don’t generally use dependency injection
Modern PHP is actually typed! It doesn’t require that you use types, but you can absolutely specify types for variables, class attributes, function parameters, return values… And an exception will be thrown if something tries to use an incorrect type. It is still dynamically typed, so it’s done at runtime. Which kinda bites sometimes. However, there are static analysis tools like PHPStan that do a great job of helping avoid typing-related issues.
It’s not a perfect typing system but since sometime around PHP ~7.2 it became fairly nice to typehint basically everywhere and it’s only continued to mature and get better over time - It’s missing some things of course (I want generics!), but it’s way better than the nightmare that was PHP 5 and older.
Yeah this is another thing that is a “vanilla PHP issue” that Laravel solves quite will imho - Through a very batteries-included package called
sail. For most Laravel projects, it’s a one-time 10-minute setup/configuration process for the developer, which should become a single command for other devs. And even then all it does is setup a bunch of sane defaults for runningdocker compose up, along with a bunch of shortcuts for running commands within the containers. Just today, I lent a coworker a hand with a project they had already set up to run via sail, and it wasgit clone [project] cd [project] sail upand I had a working setup as soon as the containers were ready.
Sorry, I didn’t initially set out to write this as a love letter to Laravel, but I noticed your frustration appeared to be (largely) related to older versions of PHP and thought I’d mention that things have changed loads in the past few years. And then basically any time I’m doing something in PHP I use Laravel because I like it; And I work in PHP a lot because I work for a mostly-PHP shop. That said, even when I’m working in other languages, I often find myself wishing I had features from Laravel. Stuff like collections, Eloquent, storage disks, pipelines… It’s a long list.