I wonder if most developers that trash on PHP for trivial issues like seen in this thread haven't been using it for many years, or had a bad experience (e.g. maintaining a legacy app).

Some developers live in a kind of technical vacuum where, I guess they assume, the technical features of their programming language are what makes the difference in the value of the business they're building.

In reality, the difference is in how easy it is to hire developers, the package library, overall ecosystem and developer experience, or: how can I make a great product.

I'm a PHP "hater", so take this for what it's worth.

You are very close to implying that the language doesn't matter if you can hire developers and there are a lot of good packages in the ecosystem.

Having worked on several PHP projects (Most being version 7.0+ and zero of them being older than 5.3), the languages is STILL full of gotchas, and it's a huge drag on productivity. I assert that this DOES matter. Even basic stuff like trying to use the default "array" as a dictionary has absolutely ridiculous issues like if you try to use a string as a key, but it is a string of digits. It will automagically convert your string to an int and totally F-up your dictionary.

I've actually been bitten by that one. And it showed up in production, because I didn't know or care what the string keys might be. Who the hell would've guessed that behavior after working with non-broken languages before?

Inb4 "That just means you're dumb. Just use SPL. You can write bad code in any language."

I've used Symfony. It's good. I haven't used Laravel. I assume it's also good. I still don't know why you'd choose to start a project in PHP today when there are great libraries in many other languages that are not as broken as PHP.

Honestly, PHP 7+ is not horrible, but it's also not better than anything else... In fact, the very best PHP code you can write today looks basically the same as the best Java code you could've written a decade ago.

I've done plenty of PHP programming (including modern) in the past. I'm excited about recent developments.

Not sure about the productivity claim. I once wrote from scratch (frameworks excluded) backend and frontend (version 1) of a multi-tenant, cloud-based video-sharing platform with PHP as the backend (aws cloud) in a matter of weeks.

I once wrote, from scratch (frameworks excluded), an entire backend (and front-end) of version 1 of a hybrid mobile app (backend in PHP) for a medium-size logistics company in a matter of less than 2 months.

I have other examples, but life is too short trying to convince "haters" that they might not be 100% correct.

I was the only developer on both of those projects. Your mileage may vary :)

Can you attribute that specifically to PHP making that possible? Why couldn't an equivalently capable peer use Python to do the same?

PHP has excellent development experience. After updating your code, you can just reload the page. That's it. It's seamless. This is something that I sorely miss now that I'm a .NET developer.

Also, the PHP ecosystem is friendly to beginners. Compare these authentication docs for a PHP project vs a .NET project:

Laravel (PHP): https://laravel.com/docs/7.x/authentication ASP.NET Core (.NET): https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/security/authen...

This is available with many other languages as well, i.e. https://github.com/cosmtrek/air

It may require an external tool, but the deployment experience is a lot simpler for Go than PHP.