I know probably 10 or more young PHP devs and zero Rust devs (regardless of age).

i know js devs switching to php, modern php is something quite different than the old one

about 6 months ago we hired a 24 aged guy as a php developer (with more than 3 year experience). so yes. with recent changes in PHP, like modernize stack, good frameworks (laravel, symfony, hyperf) and huge speed it gains from new runtimes like swoole, openswoole, frankenphp, it is really good stack to start new projects and have almost zero need for future migration to something else. i need to mention we have GO in our backend stack as well and no plan to migrate anything but in our case GO services can easily be replaced with new PHP runtimes and we would have no performance issues.

I know several people who got burn out working in the js ecosystem and who went to php instead. Finally things are quiet, stable and fast. Older people I know don't really care (I worked with IBM software in the 80s/90s, talking about slow and bloated), but the younger ones get very upset with the churn, bloat, overhead, etc.

> But do young devs/engineers even touch PHP these days?

Of course! I'm 41 and still code in PHP. ;)

PHP is great, especially with Laravel.

PHP has been on a steady decline for the last 10-15 years. Its a slow process, but in the end it most likely will fade out.

I don't know about trends among young developers, but I can tell you that the majority of the fintech world that isn't Microsoft centered (or ancient COBOL hieroglyphics) runs on PHP these days.

I ended up finding myself in finance because I had so much PHP experience from bespoke ecommerce and never left because it's everywhere.

Other language ecosystems have things I like better personally, but if you master PHP, you will never have a problem finding work.

Yeah, I was a little confused at all the talk about ML becoming a first class citizen in the language, when in reality it’s just a math library. (a seemingly good math library to be fair!)

I don’t know though, I feel like calling out to an API for doing ML stuff in PHP is always gonna make more sense. The compute power in services offered by AI companies are typically gonna be better than what you probably have on the server that’s running your PHP code. Unless your business is completely built around doing some kind of ML inference AND you went all in on PHP for the backend, then I guess it would make sense.

It’s still a cool extension. I myself still maintain multiple websites built with PHP. It’s not dead people!

Check the photo in your pocket, are you fading? Quick, go write some AI before you disappear completely!

Anyone who cafés about security would stay away from PHP. Certainly more than 22% of the web.

They're counting wordpress, drupal, various forums, etc. They make up a huge percentage of custom sites.

If you're talking only custom built stacks, the percentage is definitely lower, but probably still surprisingly high.

Its a "fact" PHP devs love. The truth is 95% of PHP is not actaully PHP, bit wordpress/drupal and the other cms's.

Its click, drag, click drag and the underlying tech has zero importance really.

78% of websites where it can be deduced from client side code what server side tech is used. W3tech published this statistic, and the whole community picked it up while ignoring that very important caveat.

Not a very meaningful statistic.

He's mentioned (on twitter, and his Lex Fridman interview) relying on https://replicate.com/ and https://fal.ai/ as the workhorses for his AI stuff.