This is the time of year that everyone gets introspective. Everyone becomes a pundit and starts waxing philosophical. What was big this past year? What will be the prevailing trend next year? It is always the same.
Invariably, one or more of these well-meaning individuals will proclaim that PHP is dead and that “X” is the next trend in web programming. I have been working with PHP for 15 years, for 10 of them I have actively been involved in the community. In the past 10 years, I have seen this almost every year.
Here is the thing they seem to forget, momentum. By some measurements, PHP runs 80% of the web. I believe the more conservative number of 50% but whichever number you go with, that is a lot of web sites that depend on PHP. If the core disband tomorrow, there would still be work for PHP developers for years to come. Don’t believe me? Go out to simplyhired.com and search for FoxPro. Last I checked, there were over a thousand, and Microsoft killed FoxPro more than six years ago.
PHP has momentum. More than that though, PHP has a group of Core developers pushing it forward. Constantly expanding it’s capabilities and thus expanding the opportunities for PHP developers.
PHP is in a renaissance. The new capabilities of PHP 7 give it a renewed lease on life. The performance improvements in PHP 7 mean that existing sites can do the job with roughly half the resources. The fact that it is the fastest dynamic language out there, means that new projects and startups are starting to look at it again.
There will come a time when PHP will die. This, however, is not it’s year. PHP is alive and well. The Core is cranking out new features, bug fixes, security patches, and other goodies that make our lives better on a regular basis.
Most important though, our community is growing and evolving. We are better organized than we have ever been. We have a group who is dedicated to making sure that our projects work together. We have more conferences and learning opportunities than we have at any point in the past.
PHP is not dead my friends, it’s just got it second wind.
I enrirely agree with you. I would go as far as to say that during the second half of the 80’s, when I started with Basic in my MSX I often heard that Cobol was dead. They pur it in coffin but clear forgot to hammer the nails. with PHP the same bullshit. Since the 90’s I have heard that PHP is this, that, unsafe, buggy and that crap. I just wonder whether Facebook, Yahoo, WordPress and ,Joomla frameworks and lms tools like Moodle just care about those IT fortune tellers’s comments…