Java is more akin to the Corolla. Utterly insipid (by design), lacking in refinements compared to competitors like the Mazda3, and made for people who just see it as a way to get from point A to point B.
PHP is the Hyundai Elantra of programming. It used to be popular because of low adoption costs but was the butt of jokes for a long time because of its questionable design and poor reliability. But like the Elantra, it has come a long way and is actually decent these days.
catigula · 2h ago
This is very ignorant of a modern Corolla in a lot of ways.
As an example, since 2023, the standard base level Corolla has an automated suite of driving assistance technologies that blow away anything Mazda offers even at their highest level of expense.
There is only one car that passed testing for automatic emergency braking from 62mph to a dead-stop (future standard) - the Toyota Corolla.
nostrademons · 29m ago
I think it's a pretty good analogy - the only programming language that I think might be a better one would be Go.
Toyota Corollas are exceptionally well-engineered cars. The thing is, they're engineered for convenience, reliability, and affordability. Toyota explicitly eschews bells and whistles that seem impressive but would add complexity to the car, because complexity usually brings cost and unreliability with it. So you get a car that is boring to drive, boring to ride in, but fulfills the car's primary purpose (getting you from point A to point B, cheaply and safely) extremely well.
Likewise, Java is also extremely well-engineered. If you've ever looked in the internals of the JVM or the class libraries, there is a lot of thought and a lot of advanced technology that went into it. But it's engineered to be boring. It's made so that the average programmer at a big company can be productive without screwing things up too much.
The only reason I'd say that Go might be a better analogy is because Go is also extremely well-engineered, but it's engineered to be reliable when used by average programmers at big companies. There are still quite a few footguns in Java around multithreading and exception handling. Go just says "We'll use CSP for concurrency, which is already battle-tested, and we'll make every programmer handle every error case explicitly even though it's lots of boilerplate code, because if you don't make engineers think about it they get it wrong." That's a pretty apt analogy to the Corolla, which is also pretty concerned with making sure that semi-skilled mechanics and unskilled drivers need to explicitly think about what they're doing because otherwise they get it wrong.
kube-system · 1h ago
The modern Corolla, like most competitive cars, is a good, safe, high-quality, reliable car. These qualities aren't at odds with being "insipid". The Corolla interior feels utilitarian, its features are spartan, and the driving dynamics are... behaved.
It does exactly what a transportation device needs to do, and it does them quite well. However, neither excitement nor flavor were in the design criteria.
rconti · 15m ago
I just had a rental Corolla in Europe. It had a lot of driving assistance features, and they're all absolute dogshit (and, I think, mandated by EU regulators). It's a pain in the ass to turn them all off every time you start the car, and I don't know how any drives these cars with them enabled.
The cluster flashes CONSTANTLY. It flashes to tell you there's a speed limit change. It flashes to tell you there's a crosswalk. It's a cacophony of alerts that lead to immediate fatigue and make all alerts meaningless.
The car beeps constantly. It beeps to tell you the speed limit changed (which happens multiple times per minute in many places). Often in places where the speed limit change isn't signed, but implied -- every interchange on the highway, the limit dips for a side road, then increases again after you pass the side road. It beeps persistently to tell you you're over the speed limit by 1kph, and keeps beeping for at least 5 or maybe 10 seconds.
It tugs at the steering wheel constantly, when it thinks you're too close to a white line. I got news for ya, in countries with narrow roads, you're ALWAYS near a white line. It tugs you towards an oncoming bus because you're cheating too far towards the opposite shoulder. It tugs you towards passing vehicles because you dared make room for faster traffic to go by (see this a fair bit in eastern europe).
Too many of my recent rentals have been Toyotas, usually hybrids (RAV4, Corolla Cross, Corolla).
Give me the Mazda.
maxerickson · 1h ago
The sibling comment is defending what Java has grown into also.
mldbk · 1h ago
You definitely tried Mazda long ago :)
Reubachi · 1h ago
Great analogy, horrible example in the analogy heh. (Hate to nitpick)
Of the two, Mazda3 would be the "less frills, cheaper, works", especially in 2025.
I also don't recall a period of lack of trust for corolla due to design/repair ability; My great uncle always talks about his "first real, new car" being a 69 corolla that was a workhorse. That paved the way for the JP takeover by the late 80s.
Freedom2 · 2h ago
Modern Java is quite good these days, no? Type inference, fibers, text blocks, records...
I agree if we were talking about Java 8 (and I have no doubt a lot of people are still unfortunately using that), but I wouldn't mind a modern Java setup as much as I would have in the past.
perching_aix · 2h ago
Pretty funny you mention Java 8 as a negative example, I remember it being widely heralded as a step in the right direction that was a long time coming and a breath of fresh air.
dionian · 2h ago
The JVM and its ecosystem are the best thing about the Java platform. Not the language, i dont even use it anymore and i am nearly 100% JVM based. But even then its still not horrible. it's just that there are better options like Scala.
iainctduncan · 2h ago
PHP did well for ONE reason: it was really, really, really easy to deploy. This was, of course, underestimated by programmers in the know, but I remember first getting into web dev, and I could start putting real programs (!!!) on the web, in minutes!
I would say it was more like the bicycle. Cheap, no license, even a kid could be suddenly zooming around town with no ceremony, no red tape, minimal investment.
I haven't used it in well over a decade, but still remember fondly how great it was as a gateway drug to bigger and better things.
nine_k · 49m ago
Can't upvote this enough. Zero friction is like superconductivity: a huge, qualitative jump. If doing the key thing is trivially, absurdly easy, people will readily excuse whatever shortcomings the product may have, be it a specialist tool like Docker, or a mass-audience service like Twitter.
(Do one thing, but do it well; sounds familiar?)
aaronbaugher · 2h ago
Yep. I was doing Perl CGI scripts at the time, and you often ran into deployment issues somewhere along the line of uploading the scripts via FTP, making them executable, and setting the permissions on any files that needed to be written. Building PHP into the web server instead of external CGI scripts eliminated a lot of that, so it was more likely to just work without some back-and-forth with a web admin to get things setup right for CGI to work. It wasn't the language, but the way it was deployed.
incanus77 · 28m ago
Yes! This was huge. You could go from coding to uploading to refreshing your application as fast as you could perform those actions. And don’t forget, with Perl CGI, you had to output the right Content-Type header (and two carriage returns) at the top of your outputted page content for the browser to even parse it correctly.
PaulHoule · 3h ago
Other languages caught up with PHP.
As I remember it all the early languages that let you write code inline with the HTML were proprietary such as server-side Javascript built into Netscape's web server, ColdFusion, ASP, etc.
PHP was the first of these that was open source and basically competent which made it my #1 choice for making web applications in 2001. Compared to many other languages (say cgi-bin) it was pretty fast without a build step and had enough resource management that hosting firms could offer cheap PHP hosting plans which made world-changing open source products like Wordpress deployable.
It got long in the tooth quickly because people realized that to make quality web applications you had to have a part of your framework (a "router") which could serve different pages based on the inputs. For example, if you are doing server-side error handling on a form you either display a form that says "successful" or you re-display the form with error messages. You certainly can write PHP that does that if you have some discipline, but once you introduce a router you might as well write your "views" with some kind of templating system and after ruby-on-rails every language got frameworks, typically Sinatra-like, which were about as comfortable as PHP and that pushed you into having some discipline.
cosmic_cheese · 2h ago
Its HTML-inline nature is the entire reason I ever used it. At some point in the early 2000s I came across PHP’s include, which felt like the piece of HTML that’d always been missing. Suddenly I no longer had to manually keep all that header/nav/footer code in sync across N pages! Magical.
It wasn’t until Rails rolled around that I built anything resembling a “real” web app, though. The structure and convention it brought made it much more approachable than PHP, because all the examples of more involved PHP at that point were chaos-spaghetti that was a challenge to tease apart and use as an example for learning.
kstrauser · 2h ago
PHP is so hard for me to describe. I used it a lot in the late 90s when we were migrating off mod_perl because it was a great way to add dynamic data to otherwise static pages, and no one really knew how to develop large sites yet. We were making it up as we went along. But ye gods, the language was bad. “A poor craftsman blames his tools” and all that, but imagine a screwdriver with 2 handles and 3 tips projecting at random angles. Sure, you could assemble an IKEA desk with it, but would you want to? And would you look suspiciously at anyone who claimed to love that weird screwdriver when the equivalent of a Snap-On was available for free from the same place they got the weirdo?
I think that’s the root of much of the horror. No one would bat an eye at using PHP to add little bits of server-side content here and there. It’s great for that! But then you see the giant castles of non-Euclidean horror built with it, and people pointing to them and saying “see what you can built with that weird screwdriver?”, and parts of the castles randomly fall off and kill their owners. No! While that’s impressive, it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the screwdriver, or in the people who keep using it to build things larger than it was clearly able to do well. But heaven help you if you point out that there are saner screwdrivers. “You’re just being close minded and out of touch! We added another handle to it and removed the razor blade so it’s much better now!”
Maybe so, but wow, it’s still one hell of an odd screwdriver.
arcanemachiner · 13m ago
A fractal of bad design, if you will.
teunispeters · 47m ago
Emphatically no. PHP is the ford escort of programming (needing regular maintenance, rather insecure but easy and simple to drive and control). Unlike the Toyota Corolla which is really REALLY reliable, consistent and much much more secure.
(as someone who's maintained a lot of different vehicles for years and a lot of programming languages this doesn't even quite cut it. PHP is a lemon car).
Zak · 2h ago
The author makes a fair point that the language is no longer the fractal of bad design it was in 2009, but doesn't make the case for starting a green field project with it in 2025.
What does it do better than other languages? The article mentions features that sound like parity with other modern languages, but nothing that stands out.
JoshuaDavid · 49m ago
> What does it do better than other languages?
Shared nothing architecture. If you're using e.g. fastapi you can store some data in memory and that data will be available across requests, like so
This is often the fastest way to solve your immediate problem, at the cost of making everything harder to reason about. PHP persists nothing between requests, so all data that needs to persist between requests must be explicitly persisted to some specific external data store.
Non-php toolchains, of course, offer the same upsides if you hold them right. PHP is harder to hold wrong in this particular way, though, and in my experience the upside of eliminating that class of bug is shockingly large compared to how rarely I naively would have expected to see it in codebases written by experienced devs.
graemep · 2h ago
I think the advantages are pretty much what they always were.
1. Easy deployment - especially on shared hosting
2. Shared nothing between requests means easy concurrency AND parallelism
3. Mixing with HTML means you do not need a separate template language
Not everyone will see the third as an advantage, and many web frameworks, including PHP ones, prefer a separate, more restrictive, template language. It can be a footgun, but it is very convenient sometimes.
hombre_fatal · 1h ago
I think #1 has been outdated for a long time. FTP or copying files through CPanel hasn't been more convenient than workflows like `fly deploy` where you don't even need to know about a remote file system nor about a server that's already running. And php-fpm being called by nginx is also more complicated than just "node script.js" or running a compiled Go binary.
While I never actually wanted it, #2 was kinda cool spiritually. Same with CGI or a Cloudflare edge worker.
kstrauser · 2h ago
I think 1 is a myth. It’s easy to deploy as long as you don’t care about atomic updates, like the newly uploaded version of foo.php importing bar.php which hasn’t been uploaded yet. Solve that, say with a DAG of which files to upload in which order, and it’s no longer easier than anything else.
Like many other things, PHP makes it easier to do the wrong thing than other languages which make you do the same thing correctly.
fragmede · 1h ago
Wouldn't that be better solved by uploading everything to a v2 directory and then renaming the directories?
sharpshadow · 2h ago
Maybe it is a good base for vibe coding since there is a lot of code around?
Zak · 1h ago
There's a lot of bad code around, and I think the protections of a (good) static type system are likely of particular use in that scenario. I'd be interested in reading a test of that prediction if anyone has done it (but not interested enough to do it myself).
bigstrat2003 · 2h ago
Honestly the author doesn't even make a great case that PHP has improved since 2009. His arguments mostly seemed to be "don't use the old busted way, there's a better way now". But if you have to go out of your way to remember to not use the old busted way, sooner or later you will shoot yourself in the foot. Having good defaults matters, and the author seems to ignore that.
sjm-lbm · 2h ago
I think you're underestimating how hard it is to shoot yourself in the foot when using the PHP language defaults and the defaults for any modern PHP framework - it's genuinely hard to do.
I still don't think PHP is a good idea for a greenfield project or anything, but they have done a good job of hiding all the footguns.
jamil7 · 3h ago
The article loses impact due to the way the author keeps self-conciously mentioning how the "PHP haters" are wrong instead of just explaining the possible usecase for PHP better.
I've never really used it but it would have been somewhat useful to know why anyone would choose this language for a greenfield project in 2025, given the choices available. The reasons given are pretty unconvincing to me.
woleium · 2h ago
Php developers are easy to find and cheaper than the alternatives, that alone seals the deal for many businesses
DonHopkins · 2h ago
I wouldn't trust a PHP developer who wasn't able to figure out how to become a JavaScript developer.
steelbird · 1h ago
Not everyone wants to become a JavaScript developer.
woleium · 2h ago
… who are also relatively inexpensive and easy to find?
tracker1 · 1h ago
I often wish it weren't the case as much. There's a massive cassum the size of the Grand Canyon between the majority of JS devs and good JS devs that understand the language, and have a good grasp of software craftsmanship. And that doesn't mean stuffing JS based projects with "Enterprise" patterns that don't make sense in the platform being used.
resource_waste · 1h ago
But I can deploy a decent sized Laravel app in about 2 days... I would need to learn the javascript equivalent.
jancsika · 21m ago
Couldn't agree more.
I've mentored for a lot of PHP GSoC projects. I always force the students to use PHP binaries from the late 90s or early 2000s (the sweet spot IMHO). Those versions are typically simpler in design/implementation, built to last, and-- for the relatively minor bugs you find-- there are lots and lots of workarounds you can find all over the web.
I do understand the conveniences that make people choose the latest version. But these GSoC students are typically working on projects where things like personal health data must be kept secure on public facing servers. For those cases, being able to understand the engine-- and even change it out manually, if needed-- is paramount to security.
In short, those earlier versions were designed by engineers to last. And if you know how to patch the runtime you can essentially drive them forever.
And... scene. :)
ChrisMarshallNY · 3h ago
I’ve used PHP for more than 20 years. It’s my “go-to” language for the backend. I’m not a server programmer, and PHP is fast, well-supported, and, if you’re a decent programmer, you can write robust, secure, performant servers in it.
I also really don’t like the language. I’ve never warmed to it.
But I think it will still be around, as a principal backend language, for the next fifty years.
I call it "The Fishtank Graph," for obvious reasons.
89vision · 3h ago
I wonder where this graph gets it's data from. Scala sitting at 4.6 percent and python at 1.2 percent is not what I would expect, but my perception of the industry could be totally off.
dagw · 2h ago
I wonder where this graph gets it's data from
They've apparently written their own web crawler that attempts to infer what language is used based on a bunch of, unspecified, heuristics. I wonder if at least some of the problem is that it is very easy to see if site uses PHP and much harder to see if a site uses a python backend and a such most python using sites just aren't being counted.
ChrisMarshallNY · 2h ago
I think that we tend to have personal biases, depending on the context of our relationships and professional cultures.
I totally believe the graph, if only for things like WordPress, and a number of other infrastructure-level tools.
I know that the porn industry is still big on PHP. There was a post here, some time ago, that linked to a PornHub programmer, talking about their IT stack, and it was all PHP.
It's a boring workhorse. The "boring" part is attractive to IT pros.
rrr_oh_man · 2h ago
> server-side programming languages for websites
Maybe because most websites are Wordpress websites.
89vision · 2h ago
The PHP thing is believable, I'm just still stuck on scala vs python based on my observations from working in the industry and being part of the hiring process for both of these languages. Perhaps it's because I work in B2B SAAS where these products aren't always necessarily exposed to the public internet.
captainkrtek · 2h ago
Yeah this feels off, though if its assessing all/many sites it could make some sense, versus assessing the top N sites by traffic.
ChrisMarshallNY · 2h ago
See my note about the pron industry.
Those sites get a lot of traffic.
I did notice that JavaScript (which may include TypeScript) is going up, but so is Java, and that Java is still higher than JavaScript.
woleium · 2h ago
i feel like that graph just shows wordpress dominance (43% of all websites) and a bit of joomla (2%) and drupal (1%), which are all php based.
lucasyvas · 3h ago
PHP is a DeLorean. I think I encountered 10 segfaults in it within 1 year which is a complete joke. This was only two years ago.
It also includes breaking changes in point releases which is a nonsensical maintenance strategy - this is in stark contrast to the reputation of stability in a Corolla.
While PHP may have some strengths, it immediately fails this particular comparison.
9dev · 3h ago
> I think I encountered 10 segfaults in it within 1 year which is a complete joke.
Segfaults in PHP are highly unusual. The language definitely has warts, but it's extremely well tested and usually doesn't crash in production, unless you're using unstable extensions or pre-release versions.
> It also includes breaking changes in point releases which is a nonsensical maintenance strategy
There are lots of projects out there that do not follow semver for their releases; that doesn't mean it isn't stable in itself. Having said that, every PHP release at least has proper change logs so you can safely migrate to a new version.
GiorgioG · 2h ago
I will never give PHP any serious thought. Back in the mid 2000s I started an app hosting company as a side-gig. I started out hosting FogBugz (bug tracker) because Fog Creek Software only offered it as a self-hosted option. I had zero problems for 9 months - it was a Microsoft ASP based app (IIRC). Then I decided to host a helpdesk app called HelpSpot. At the time it was a one-man startup and he didn't offer a SaaS option either so he was happy to send customers my way. The software itself was fine (and it's still around) but it was a PHP-based system and no matter how up to date I kept the servers, the PHP servers got hacked over and over due to PHP's complete disregard for security at the time. My claim to fame is I hosted Twitter's first helpdesk. I got tired of getting home from work and having to rebuild servers almost weekly, so I "sold" my fledgling little sidegig for $2k. Screw PHP.
bbarnett · 2h ago
While it certainly could have been PHP, the amount of poorly coded PHP back then was more often the issue.
It's one of the main reasons that frameworks exist today. 99% of DEVs are not security conscious enough, and would leave gaping holes in their code. No input validation, SQL injections, trusting data posted to code without validation, on and on.
If you were continuously hacked no matter the update, likely the code was the issue not PHP. Or of course, your servers were backdoored at that point.
A framework often protects from much of this.
GiorgioG · 2h ago
Sorry, I don't buy it, PHP was complete and utter garbage from a security standpoint at the time:
Sure, your experience sucked. But by all means let's continue to look down our noses at a programming language based on mistakes made 20 years ago.
GiorgioG · 5m ago
I have plenty of other issues with PHP that haven't been addressed in 20 years. There are plenty of other better tools out there. You don't have to choose them, and I don't have to choose PHP.
normie3000 · 3h ago
Aren't Corollas reputed to be functional and reliable? Seems like a weird analogy.
antonymoose · 3h ago
Having always referred to Java as the Honda Civic of language-ecosystem, I take offense to this claim that PHP is the robust, cheap, and reliable workhorse.
0xbadcafebee · 2h ago
I think the author means the Nissan Versa of programming. Corollas are quite a bit more expensive and hold value longer. But both are very useful.
I've written more shell scripts than any other language for close to a decade now. The reason is simple: I'm not writing web apps. I mostly do system programming (that is to say, tasks needed to build or maintain a system or are generally user-focused yet non-interactive). You don't need more than a shell script for most of that.
My contemporaries will, of course, pooh-pooh a shell script on general principle. If it's not using a more "advanced language" it must be unreliable or unmaintainable or ugly. Yet the practical experience of writing programs in multiple languages over years leads me to the same conclusion: literally any language will do. You could use BASIC for system programming. You could use ASM. It will work. People will argue over whether one language is "better" than another, but who cares if it's better or not? If it works it works. But that's because nearly any language works for that kind of program. Other kinds of programs need advanced features, so you need a more advanced language. But for simple tasks? It doesn't matter.
To go back to the car analogy: you can use literally any car to pick up groceries. You can't use any car to pick up 3,000lbs of sandbags.
If we were scientists and not craftspeople, none of these discussions would be relevant. We'd pick up the tool designed for our specific purpose and not bicker over our personal preferences or idealistic principles. But our languages, and our approach to using them, is anything but scientific. We're just a bunch of tradies talking shit at the water cooler.
pkphilip · 36m ago
I have programmed using Php for at least 25 years. While PHP did start off being quite poorly designed for security, newer versions of Php and also the PHP frameworks like Laravel, Yii etc have become quite sophisticated over the years and is a really good alternative to frameworks like Rails etc.
The CMS frameworks have also improved quite a bit.
The improvements in PHP include big performance gains - PHP 7 was a huge improvement over PHP 5 and now PHP 8 also includes a JIT), improvements in the language such as a type system, object orientation, improved error handling etc.
PHP 8 is a lot faster (about 3x) faster than Python.
Sorry, that's an insult to Toyota and Corolla. PHP is at best a Nissan car.
AnotherGoodName · 2h ago
I always found Hack interesting. It's PHP slowly transformed step by step into something closer to Java (Java isn't as bad as new grads claim, compared to PHP it's actually great). It's pretty much exclusively used at Meta.
Basically what they did is they had repeated codemods (changes to the entire codebase with automated tooling) that bit by bit moved PHP closer to Java. More and more static typing, generics, all the common Java ADTs (Vector, Map, Set, Pair, etc.), bytecode+JIT execution, etc.
Essentially instead of rewriting the codebase to a better language they just changed the language itself. Which makes sense since PHP is a much smaller codebase than the Meta backend.
benburleson · 2h ago
I dabbled in Hack and HHVM several (almost 10 now??) years ago but haven't kept up. My understanding was that PHP8+ now includes the improvements that Hack brought, making the leap to Hack less interesting/valuable. Is that not the case?
JohnMakin · 1h ago
I fell in love with PHP in kind of a funny way (and looking at my career now, was probably an indicator I was destined for what I do now) because it saved me during college.
My 2nd to last quarter I had to cram 20 difficult units because of some requirement I had somehow missed. Part of that was a 5 unit web development project/lecture course. Our project was to build an ecommerce site. We were introduced to several paradigms of how to build end to end, PHP being one of them - and as other commenters have noted, what I particularly liked was its ease of deployment.
However, the class at the end pushed everyone towards vanilla JS, which I have never had much success working with and to be honest kind of loathed it. I could NOT deploy the site with it on the school servers - apparently I wasn't the only one.
So, I looked carefully at the rubric and realized only 20% of it was code evaluation. The rest was site design, and one massive chunk of the grade was simply just getting it deployed by the deadline.
So, I wrote it in php because I knew 1000% it would work and I could get it running on time. The TA wanted to fail the project, but since only 20% of the grade was code, I got a B-. Almost everyone failed because only a few people could get it deployed at all.
I'd love to work on modern PHP projects but don't know where to start or what even is out there, people just scoff at it because it looks horribly ugly and its history of security flaws.
eptcyka · 1h ago
The corolla is wonderfully designed for its main purpose- a cash cow in its segment. PHP just worked, but it is not well designed. The reason it is somewhat simple to deploy is because everyone and their dog had to learn how to deploy it - compared to deploying a Go binary it is miserable.
potato3732842 · 1h ago
The fact that people are ignoring the degree to which human factors are responsible for making the Corolla what it is in people's minds is disappointing albeit 100% predictable.
The Toyota Corolla would not be what you think it is if "Altima people" historically went out and bought them in droves and many would do well to think about comparable effects on other classes of product (Adobe Flash anyone?).
decasia · 1h ago
I spent a few years trying to work on legacy PHP systems. Would never take another job using it if I had any choice. Most large tech companies do not have large PHP codebases, and most small ad hoc PHP codebases are awful to work with (in my experience), so the intersection of "uses PHP" and "higher quality software engineering" is pretty small. I won't say it's an empty set, but it's a small opportunity space. Meanwhile, the odds of having to work on really awful codebases are... high.
Generally - we live in a world with lots of fantastic programming languages, so I would never choose PHP for a greenfield project if I had a choice, and I would not pursue professional opportunities with legacy PHP codebases except in very special circumstances.
PeterStuer · 1h ago
There's few programming environments I hated more viscerally than PHP. Yes, it got the job done. But thank God I never had to maintain that giant kludge of duct tape and elastic bands.
rwaksmunski · 19m ago
If PHP is a Corolla, whats a Land Cruiser then? Rust?
daft_pink · 1h ago
I think the allure of javascript is the idea that you can use sparse server resources and have your software mostly run on the client side.
I’m resistant to using php, because I really don’t want to have heavy server resources, but if I were building an app that used heavy server resources anyways, I would be open to php.
threetonesun · 1h ago
That's certainly one appeal of JavaScript, but also consider that the client being a browser means you can run JavaScript on uncountable numbers of devices. And since the introduction of Node there's also the appeal of being able to write in one language for both server and client.
pinewurst · 3h ago
The Trabant of Programming
cies · 57m ago
The Corolla was simple but very well designed; it's manuals were used in classes teaching car mechanics.
PHP was not well designed. No one learning to program should choose it as a first language. That fact that people did choose it was because it was free, easier than Perl and cheap/easy to deploy (in the shared hosting era).
You are better off starting with a typed language like C#/Java/Kotlin (for OO-first) or OCaml/F# (for FP-first) or even Golang.
PHP sets you back if chosen as a first language.
sam_lowry_ · 1h ago
PHP Must Die is not a wish, its an execution paradygm.
theanonymousone · 1h ago
I beg to differ, sorry. It's clearly Java.
MarkusQ · 2h ago
If I were Toyota, I'd sue.
wodenokoto · 3h ago
I still think the way you mix php and html is the best. It’s not php + jinja, it’s just php.
Dude, you’re totally right. Common Lisp is the Bagger 288 of programming. It's this absolute unit of a machine, designed to literally eat mountains. And when the first mine shut down, it didn’t retire or rust away. They drove it across Germany at 2 miles an hour, moving villages and flattening everything in its path. People came out just to watch it roll by like it was some kind of steel god. Eventually it got a new job at another mine, still doing work nothing else could touch.
That’s Lisp. It was made for brain-level problems before AI was cool. It didn’t disappear, it just kept doing its thing while the rest of the world stacked layer after layer of frameworks and hype. It’s not trendy. It’s not dead. It’s just too powerful for most people to even know what to do with. It won’t write your todo app, but if you’re trying to build something wild that actually thinks a little, Lisp is still sitting there, waiting.
jrm4 · 1h ago
Right, I think this gets at the biggest issue with "judging languages."
We'd like 'thereotical fundamental aesthetics that strongly predict beautiful and useful programs' to be the thing to judge languages on and well, nope, never.
None of that matters until people start making stuff. And people making stuff with the language which in turn equals more people making stuff with the language is the primary metric.
erichocean · 54m ago
Clojure is the Mercedes of programming.
haunter · 2h ago
What’s the Camry of programming then?
calvinmorrison · 2h ago
php is so boring and it works. i am so surprised to not see more jobs on HN for it. I don't really consider myself a PHP programmer, it just, what we use I dont think about it, almost ever.
msgodel · 2h ago
The corolla may be boring but it's the well designed kind of boring. I think Python or maybe Java is the Corolla of programming.
PHP is boring and poorly designed. Maybe more like some of the very old Eastern European cars.
debarshri · 3h ago
What is Java then?
mmcromp · 3h ago
A Soviet moving castle made from Volkswagen Beetles
e: (my only real experience with java is spring boot)
briffid · 3h ago
Just look at the Java installer: What is Java? Java is everywhere!
DonHopkins · 2h ago
Java is a DSL for taking large XML files and converting them to stack traces.
baggachipz · 3h ago
A Toyota Corolla where you have to import 1000 parts with hideously long names in order to get it running every day.
dionian · 2h ago
even back when i didnt do scala, i used an IDE to fully automate this. By far the least annoying part of the system.
willismichael · 51m ago
Do tell, what were the more annoying parts of the system?
PHP is the Hyundai Elantra of programming. It used to be popular because of low adoption costs but was the butt of jokes for a long time because of its questionable design and poor reliability. But like the Elantra, it has come a long way and is actually decent these days.
As an example, since 2023, the standard base level Corolla has an automated suite of driving assistance technologies that blow away anything Mazda offers even at their highest level of expense.
There is only one car that passed testing for automatic emergency braking from 62mph to a dead-stop (future standard) - the Toyota Corolla.
Toyota Corollas are exceptionally well-engineered cars. The thing is, they're engineered for convenience, reliability, and affordability. Toyota explicitly eschews bells and whistles that seem impressive but would add complexity to the car, because complexity usually brings cost and unreliability with it. So you get a car that is boring to drive, boring to ride in, but fulfills the car's primary purpose (getting you from point A to point B, cheaply and safely) extremely well.
Likewise, Java is also extremely well-engineered. If you've ever looked in the internals of the JVM or the class libraries, there is a lot of thought and a lot of advanced technology that went into it. But it's engineered to be boring. It's made so that the average programmer at a big company can be productive without screwing things up too much.
The only reason I'd say that Go might be a better analogy is because Go is also extremely well-engineered, but it's engineered to be reliable when used by average programmers at big companies. There are still quite a few footguns in Java around multithreading and exception handling. Go just says "We'll use CSP for concurrency, which is already battle-tested, and we'll make every programmer handle every error case explicitly even though it's lots of boilerplate code, because if you don't make engineers think about it they get it wrong." That's a pretty apt analogy to the Corolla, which is also pretty concerned with making sure that semi-skilled mechanics and unskilled drivers need to explicitly think about what they're doing because otherwise they get it wrong.
It does exactly what a transportation device needs to do, and it does them quite well. However, neither excitement nor flavor were in the design criteria.
The cluster flashes CONSTANTLY. It flashes to tell you there's a speed limit change. It flashes to tell you there's a crosswalk. It's a cacophony of alerts that lead to immediate fatigue and make all alerts meaningless.
The car beeps constantly. It beeps to tell you the speed limit changed (which happens multiple times per minute in many places). Often in places where the speed limit change isn't signed, but implied -- every interchange on the highway, the limit dips for a side road, then increases again after you pass the side road. It beeps persistently to tell you you're over the speed limit by 1kph, and keeps beeping for at least 5 or maybe 10 seconds.
It tugs at the steering wheel constantly, when it thinks you're too close to a white line. I got news for ya, in countries with narrow roads, you're ALWAYS near a white line. It tugs you towards an oncoming bus because you're cheating too far towards the opposite shoulder. It tugs you towards passing vehicles because you dared make room for faster traffic to go by (see this a fair bit in eastern europe).
Too many of my recent rentals have been Toyotas, usually hybrids (RAV4, Corolla Cross, Corolla).
Give me the Mazda.
Of the two, Mazda3 would be the "less frills, cheaper, works", especially in 2025.
I also don't recall a period of lack of trust for corolla due to design/repair ability; My great uncle always talks about his "first real, new car" being a 69 corolla that was a workhorse. That paved the way for the JP takeover by the late 80s.
I agree if we were talking about Java 8 (and I have no doubt a lot of people are still unfortunately using that), but I wouldn't mind a modern Java setup as much as I would have in the past.
I would say it was more like the bicycle. Cheap, no license, even a kid could be suddenly zooming around town with no ceremony, no red tape, minimal investment.
I haven't used it in well over a decade, but still remember fondly how great it was as a gateway drug to bigger and better things.
(Do one thing, but do it well; sounds familiar?)
As I remember it all the early languages that let you write code inline with the HTML were proprietary such as server-side Javascript built into Netscape's web server, ColdFusion, ASP, etc.
PHP was the first of these that was open source and basically competent which made it my #1 choice for making web applications in 2001. Compared to many other languages (say cgi-bin) it was pretty fast without a build step and had enough resource management that hosting firms could offer cheap PHP hosting plans which made world-changing open source products like Wordpress deployable.
It got long in the tooth quickly because people realized that to make quality web applications you had to have a part of your framework (a "router") which could serve different pages based on the inputs. For example, if you are doing server-side error handling on a form you either display a form that says "successful" or you re-display the form with error messages. You certainly can write PHP that does that if you have some discipline, but once you introduce a router you might as well write your "views" with some kind of templating system and after ruby-on-rails every language got frameworks, typically Sinatra-like, which were about as comfortable as PHP and that pushed you into having some discipline.
It wasn’t until Rails rolled around that I built anything resembling a “real” web app, though. The structure and convention it brought made it much more approachable than PHP, because all the examples of more involved PHP at that point were chaos-spaghetti that was a challenge to tease apart and use as an example for learning.
I think that’s the root of much of the horror. No one would bat an eye at using PHP to add little bits of server-side content here and there. It’s great for that! But then you see the giant castles of non-Euclidean horror built with it, and people pointing to them and saying “see what you can built with that weird screwdriver?”, and parts of the castles randomly fall off and kill their owners. No! While that’s impressive, it doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the screwdriver, or in the people who keep using it to build things larger than it was clearly able to do well. But heaven help you if you point out that there are saner screwdrivers. “You’re just being close minded and out of touch! We added another handle to it and removed the razor blade so it’s much better now!”
Maybe so, but wow, it’s still one hell of an odd screwdriver.
(as someone who's maintained a lot of different vehicles for years and a lot of programming languages this doesn't even quite cut it. PHP is a lemon car).
What does it do better than other languages? The article mentions features that sound like parity with other modern languages, but nothing that stands out.
Shared nothing architecture. If you're using e.g. fastapi you can store some data in memory and that data will be available across requests, like so
This is often the fastest way to solve your immediate problem, at the cost of making everything harder to reason about. PHP persists nothing between requests, so all data that needs to persist between requests must be explicitly persisted to some specific external data store.Non-php toolchains, of course, offer the same upsides if you hold them right. PHP is harder to hold wrong in this particular way, though, and in my experience the upside of eliminating that class of bug is shockingly large compared to how rarely I naively would have expected to see it in codebases written by experienced devs.
1. Easy deployment - especially on shared hosting 2. Shared nothing between requests means easy concurrency AND parallelism 3. Mixing with HTML means you do not need a separate template language
Not everyone will see the third as an advantage, and many web frameworks, including PHP ones, prefer a separate, more restrictive, template language. It can be a footgun, but it is very convenient sometimes.
While I never actually wanted it, #2 was kinda cool spiritually. Same with CGI or a Cloudflare edge worker.
Like many other things, PHP makes it easier to do the wrong thing than other languages which make you do the same thing correctly.
I still don't think PHP is a good idea for a greenfield project or anything, but they have done a good job of hiding all the footguns.
I've never really used it but it would have been somewhat useful to know why anyone would choose this language for a greenfield project in 2025, given the choices available. The reasons given are pretty unconvincing to me.
I've mentored for a lot of PHP GSoC projects. I always force the students to use PHP binaries from the late 90s or early 2000s (the sweet spot IMHO). Those versions are typically simpler in design/implementation, built to last, and-- for the relatively minor bugs you find-- there are lots and lots of workarounds you can find all over the web.
I do understand the conveniences that make people choose the latest version. But these GSoC students are typically working on projects where things like personal health data must be kept secure on public facing servers. For those cases, being able to understand the engine-- and even change it out manually, if needed-- is paramount to security.
In short, those earlier versions were designed by engineers to last. And if you know how to patch the runtime you can essentially drive them forever.
And... scene. :)
I also really don’t like the language. I’ve never warmed to it.
But I think it will still be around, as a principal backend language, for the next fifty years.
I feel like this graph says it all: https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/programmin...
I call it "The Fishtank Graph," for obvious reasons.
They've apparently written their own web crawler that attempts to infer what language is used based on a bunch of, unspecified, heuristics. I wonder if at least some of the problem is that it is very easy to see if site uses PHP and much harder to see if a site uses a python backend and a such most python using sites just aren't being counted.
I totally believe the graph, if only for things like WordPress, and a number of other infrastructure-level tools.
I know that the porn industry is still big on PHP. There was a post here, some time ago, that linked to a PornHub programmer, talking about their IT stack, and it was all PHP.
It's a boring workhorse. The "boring" part is attractive to IT pros.
Maybe because most websites are Wordpress websites.
Those sites get a lot of traffic.
I did notice that JavaScript (which may include TypeScript) is going up, but so is Java, and that Java is still higher than JavaScript.
It also includes breaking changes in point releases which is a nonsensical maintenance strategy - this is in stark contrast to the reputation of stability in a Corolla.
While PHP may have some strengths, it immediately fails this particular comparison.
Segfaults in PHP are highly unusual. The language definitely has warts, but it's extremely well tested and usually doesn't crash in production, unless you're using unstable extensions or pre-release versions.
> It also includes breaking changes in point releases which is a nonsensical maintenance strategy
There are lots of projects out there that do not follow semver for their releases; that doesn't mean it isn't stable in itself. Having said that, every PHP release at least has proper change logs so you can safely migrate to a new version.
It's one of the main reasons that frameworks exist today. 99% of DEVs are not security conscious enough, and would leave gaping holes in their code. No input validation, SQL injections, trusting data posted to code without validation, on and on.
If you were continuously hacked no matter the update, likely the code was the issue not PHP. Or of course, your servers were backdoored at that point.
A framework often protects from much of this.
https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-74/P...
https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-74/P...
I've written more shell scripts than any other language for close to a decade now. The reason is simple: I'm not writing web apps. I mostly do system programming (that is to say, tasks needed to build or maintain a system or are generally user-focused yet non-interactive). You don't need more than a shell script for most of that.
My contemporaries will, of course, pooh-pooh a shell script on general principle. If it's not using a more "advanced language" it must be unreliable or unmaintainable or ugly. Yet the practical experience of writing programs in multiple languages over years leads me to the same conclusion: literally any language will do. You could use BASIC for system programming. You could use ASM. It will work. People will argue over whether one language is "better" than another, but who cares if it's better or not? If it works it works. But that's because nearly any language works for that kind of program. Other kinds of programs need advanced features, so you need a more advanced language. But for simple tasks? It doesn't matter.
To go back to the car analogy: you can use literally any car to pick up groceries. You can't use any car to pick up 3,000lbs of sandbags.
If we were scientists and not craftspeople, none of these discussions would be relevant. We'd pick up the tool designed for our specific purpose and not bicker over our personal preferences or idealistic principles. But our languages, and our approach to using them, is anything but scientific. We're just a bunch of tradies talking shit at the water cooler.
The CMS frameworks have also improved quite a bit.
The improvements in PHP include big performance gains - PHP 7 was a huge improvement over PHP 5 and now PHP 8 also includes a JIT), improvements in the language such as a type system, object orientation, improved error handling etc.
PHP 8 is a lot faster (about 3x) faster than Python.
https://sailingbyte.com/blog/php5-to-php8-modern-programming...
Basically what they did is they had repeated codemods (changes to the entire codebase with automated tooling) that bit by bit moved PHP closer to Java. More and more static typing, generics, all the common Java ADTs (Vector, Map, Set, Pair, etc.), bytecode+JIT execution, etc.
Essentially instead of rewriting the codebase to a better language they just changed the language itself. Which makes sense since PHP is a much smaller codebase than the Meta backend.
My 2nd to last quarter I had to cram 20 difficult units because of some requirement I had somehow missed. Part of that was a 5 unit web development project/lecture course. Our project was to build an ecommerce site. We were introduced to several paradigms of how to build end to end, PHP being one of them - and as other commenters have noted, what I particularly liked was its ease of deployment.
However, the class at the end pushed everyone towards vanilla JS, which I have never had much success working with and to be honest kind of loathed it. I could NOT deploy the site with it on the school servers - apparently I wasn't the only one.
So, I looked carefully at the rubric and realized only 20% of it was code evaluation. The rest was site design, and one massive chunk of the grade was simply just getting it deployed by the deadline.
So, I wrote it in php because I knew 1000% it would work and I could get it running on time. The TA wanted to fail the project, but since only 20% of the grade was code, I got a B-. Almost everyone failed because only a few people could get it deployed at all.
I'd love to work on modern PHP projects but don't know where to start or what even is out there, people just scoff at it because it looks horribly ugly and its history of security flaws.
The Toyota Corolla would not be what you think it is if "Altima people" historically went out and bought them in droves and many would do well to think about comparable effects on other classes of product (Adobe Flash anyone?).
Generally - we live in a world with lots of fantastic programming languages, so I would never choose PHP for a greenfield project if I had a choice, and I would not pursue professional opportunities with legacy PHP codebases except in very special circumstances.
I’m resistant to using php, because I really don’t want to have heavy server resources, but if I were building an app that used heavy server resources anyways, I would be open to php.
PHP was not well designed. No one learning to program should choose it as a first language. That fact that people did choose it was because it was free, easier than Perl and cheap/easy to deploy (in the shared hosting era).
You are better off starting with a typed language like C#/Java/Kotlin (for OO-first) or OCaml/F# (for FP-first) or even Golang.
PHP sets you back if chosen as a first language.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azEvfD4C6ow
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagger_288
That’s Lisp. It was made for brain-level problems before AI was cool. It didn’t disappear, it just kept doing its thing while the rest of the world stacked layer after layer of frameworks and hype. It’s not trendy. It’s not dead. It’s just too powerful for most people to even know what to do with. It won’t write your todo app, but if you’re trying to build something wild that actually thinks a little, Lisp is still sitting there, waiting.
We'd like 'thereotical fundamental aesthetics that strongly predict beautiful and useful programs' to be the thing to judge languages on and well, nope, never.
None of that matters until people start making stuff. And people making stuff with the language which in turn equals more people making stuff with the language is the primary metric.
PHP is boring and poorly designed. Maybe more like some of the very old Eastern European cars.
e: (my only real experience with java is spring boot)