

I am immediately reminded of a classic example of memory problems in PHP: Looking at the graph of data collected during the StackOverflow survey of 2021, you can see that as many as 10,834 respondents representing nearly 60% of the total found PHP to be "dreadful".Īs an old-school PHP programmer, I understand why this is so.


Yes, this argument always comes from the mouths of developers who have become familiar with strongly typed, comparable languages. Unlike other languages and frameworks, which are often owned by large companies, the core development team is paid directly from the foundation's account which is run by contributions from private companies such as JetBrains and Symfony Corp but also by small contributions from individual developers.
#Php language bad code
did you know that PHP and its source code has been maintained since November 2021 by the independent Open Source community The PHP Foundation which pays substantial money to OpenSource developers for contributions to php-src? I will already leave the conclusions and its analysis to you, dear reader.īut then again - a dying language shouldn't tend to increase the number of job offers for programmers, right?Īs of the moment of writing this article, I can choose from 171 job offers on one of the leading job portals in Poland, of which as many as 50 are for juniors. The initial hype for the Javascript language can be seen in the same chart. The data for the analysis is taken from GitHut 2.0, which generates a chart of the number of git push per language to the Github since 2012, according to the scheme - "The language percentage distribution in the line chart shows the top 10 (or manually selected) languages since 2012/Q2".Īs you can see PHP as well as other popular languages such as Ruby, C/C++, Python have experienced a significant drop in popularity on Github in recent years, however there is an upward trend and we expect them to return to high positions after a longer sideways period. If that's not enough, let's check our "PHP death rate" against other languages.

Is this the adoption curve for new versions of a dying programming language? The latest data is available at the source site If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nailīut back to the numbers - let's take a look at last year's data on PHP versions used in Packagist packages.
#Php language bad software
Back then Software Gunslinger published an article (which by the way I highly recommend!) saying that PHP will die because it doesn't support long-lived processes and because it lacks asynchronicity.Īnd that's a fact, PHP was not made for that! The first mention that PHP is dying can be found on the web since 2013. If PHP continues this downward trend, in 18 years PHP will drop below 50% of the backend Web technology!īut okay, jokes aside - although the numbers are real as reported by W3CTechs. When you look through the numbers, the truth is sobering! Over the past year, PHP lost a staggering 1.6% of its share as the backend language of the Web. The once most popular web language is now losing popularity month by month, mostly to JavaScript. Yes, the title of this article is an absurd clickbait. Today I'm going to quote those arguments and try to change your attitude towards PHP at least a little bit. Over the years many people have asked me why I bother programming in PHP, and for many years I've heard like a mantra two recurring arguments why I should stop and start writing commercial software in languages like Java or C#.
