But at the same time, you run into the same problems that you often see with C++. Yes, there's a clean, semi-modern dialect of the language that has 80% of what you'd ideally want. And 80% is often more than enough for practical engineering purposes. But the actual project you get hired to work on may not be written in that cleaner, modern dialect. The last C++ project I cracked open had gone almost 20 years since its last serious update. It wasn't terrible. But wow, did it take a lot of very tricky code to accomplish anything before boost and TR1 became popular.

And old PHP was one of the worst languages ever invented: the core C code was hopelessly insecure (I had to read it for a client during the dotcom boom), the database APIs were different for every single database (and all of them made SQL injection techniques too easy), the default configuration allowed hostile users to inject global variable values using CGI parameters, and I could go on for a week. Yes, I saw some ugly stuff in other languages during the dotcom boom. But ancient PHP was often on a whole other level.

And when a language's history includes that much ugliness, you need to be very careful about old production code bases. Maybe you get a nice Symfony app! Buy maybe you get mixed HTML/PHP/SQL with a hundred security holes inherent in the APIs being used.

- Can you use the same rendering logic on client and server like JavaScript?

- Does it have the performance of Java or C# or Go?

- Does it allow for expressive DSLs like Ruby?

- Does it have an extensive, cutting edge ML ecosystem like Python?

Back in 2010, PHP's stand out features were very straightforward installation, good support for templating, and a large collection of C library wrappers (even if the interfaces were a bit raw). Those hooks were compelling enough to make people put up with the PHP4 core language.

But other languages have caught up on those three points, which leaves modern PHP utterly unremarkable. It doesn't have any feature that stands out enough to make me want to switch back.

Had this at my last job where I wrote PHP full time for two years. There were so many bugs caused by things that PHP has since remedied. I updated everything we could and it was huge step up (the available linting and static analysis tools are very solid), but there's still some deep, dark legacy code there that no one wanted to touch. Hell, a good part of my problem with that code base was actually because of Apache and mod_php.

If you have a fresh PHP code base, it's not that bad anymore. It wouldn't be my first pick, but definitely not my last.

Edit: I never got to work with Laravel, but I've played around independently and read their docs and it seems like a good dev experience.

Last I used Php (v4 to v8), it had type hinting, which was fine but I think its going to become harder for newcomers to approach as there stronger and stronger types, which is what made Php so special to begin with IMHO.

Which is probably because php isn’t the top choice for new web based projects anymore. I have nothing against modern php, but old php causes me lots of pain, and that’s the only php I’ve ever known!

I have recently had to delve in PHP and it was much better and more mature than what people painted it to be 10+ years ago.

A night and day difference.

Jira gave me the same experience. I hated it remembering the 2020 times, yet going back to it now...I actually liked it way more than the alternatives.

Back in the day I had one of those, even when I was broke, because the value was fantastic. There were tons of "self-hosted" type apps built with that stack (php+mysql), so you could have all sorts of apps running on there. I haven't checked in a while, but I guess nowadays that type of thing will be made for node, docker, etc.

In the endless framework wars where one day we are friends with server side rendering, the next with client side rendering and the next with eurasia, I keep seeing people reinventing what we already were doing with PHP long ago. I doubt it will happen, but I keep waiting for a PHP renaissance.

Honestly though with GH/CF pages type hosting and how simple static sites can be its a direction I'm ever thankful things have been moving. Just seems so much less painful for those who arent here to be security experts and just want a bloody site that 'just works'

* https://getcomposer.org

* https://www.php-fig.org/psr/

But if you want some small and simple framework as guidance you can also try out Slim Framework.

It's Hear, hear! as in, listen to what was said, I guess.

What if you need any kind of in-memory cache? Or in general, any kind of application maintaining state, for, say, performance reasons?