Why is PHP not a "real" language?

Wed Sep 28 03:48:34 MST 2022

I know that I am late to the party by a month, and haven’t spent much time
in the PLUG discussion groups over the past few years.  Regardless I
thought I would weigh in on this conversation.

PHP is a real language and is “Turing complete”.  PHP 7 when introduced,
could be as much as 2 times faster than Python 3 when it came out.  Not
sure where they both stand now with speed improvements in Python 3.8
through 3.10.  And I have not kept up with PHP in recent years.

Facts – It accounts for as much as 80 percent of the web applications
hosted on the internet.  It is by far bigger than any other language used
on the backend of the web stack.  60 percent of that domain usage is
WordPress with Drupal and Joomla being the next dominant PHP based
framework used in that stack.

Most of this implementation is non enterprise level, small business, and
personal usages.  But there are PHP-based enterprise implementations. The
world’s largest real estate company’s extranet that controlled thousands of
brokerages across 76 countries was written in the PHP Yii framework and
operated in that code state for more than 15 years - I extended it and
managed it for 2 years.  Much of the state and federal government’s
intranets are enterprise level implementations based on Drupal, and the
symphony PHP framework is an enterprise level PHP system with a vast
library that rivals those of Java or .Net

Language preference in programming and software engineering is colored by
so many different and competing ideas and dynamics, that it can be hard to
differentiate between confirmation bias and real-world experience.  I
recall a meeting once at a previous employer about managing multithreading
in an orchestrator we were writing.  We were discussing whether to use
Python or Java, and the Java “camp” were claiming that multithreading would
be much faster and cleaner in Java.  But the Python “camp” was opposed
because they could implement the rest of the code requirements in much less
time.  The VP of software of the firm weighed in (to the disappointment of
the Java camp) by saying that both teams could and would most likely
implement the multithreading using the C libraries anyway so the Java use
claim was really a moot point.  My point is that in the enterprise space it
is rare for a stack anymore to be implemented or even written in a single
language or framework.

PHP – Victim of the Java influenced fanaticism towards OOP

Many languages have fallen victim to the ivory tower approach to OOP
programming that was institutionalized by Java.  PHP’s obvious limitations
in OOP pre version 5.3 was a crutch for the language and during the 2013
timeframe is when C# out positioned PHP in new implementations for the
first time as referenced on the Tiobe Index.  It is my opinion that with
PHP version 5.3 it was finally seen as a fully viable (all-be-it still
limited) OOP platform and quelled C# rise in the index for a little
longer.  I feel that it was this focus and the dream to bring PHP up to the
stricter levels of implementation found in Java OOP et ell, where in
version 7 we have the required adherence to declare class method
visibility.  Add type hinting into the mix and it almost looks like Java or
C#.

The perception that PHP was somehow slow to adopt more strict OOP standards
is in my view an oversimplification and a misunderstanding of PHP’s
position in the industry.  As pervasive the boast is that Java is
ubiquitous and “everywhere” its footprint in comparison to PHP on the web
is miniscule.  A breaking change caused by a change in PHP version on the
web has at least one order of magnitude more effect than that in Java.
Couple that with the fact that the change in capabilities between 5.2 to 7
are monumental compared to the changes in Java during that same time, then
the scope of changes in PHP are nothing short of “mountain moving” without
breaking the web.

Microservices have changed the game.

If there is a downside it is that PHP has positioned itself as the king of
web-based monolithic frameworks in an age where, at least on the enterprise
side microservices are the name of the game.  Scale is the key and the
ability to break up the monolithic nature of applications into smaller
pieces that can scale independent of each other is vital in order to
leverage the cost of cloud computing.  In my view this is at odds with the
PHP based frameworks that are popular now.  While they are all scrambling
to provide “headless” implementations to allow for more flexibility and to
look more “microservice like” it is hard to break up WordPress which is
more than half a million lines of code or Drupal which is over a million.
Add in containerization (Docker and Kubernetes) and PHP is just not the go
to language for quick Implementation in these situations.  Go, Python, or
Node are going to be the first choice.

The dynamic behind this is that more and more the PHP-based CMS frameworks
will be limited to single person and small business web apps.  Even the
original LAMP stack now has to contend with the MEAN and MERN stacks that
can be spun up in the cloud in minutes.  In the enterprise space where a
firm is literally funneling half a million dollars or more per day into
their IT department to build new applications and manage cloud systems PHP
is simply not a choice.  Despite it being a state-of-the-art OOP language
at this point, it is simply not chosen in my view because it positioned
itself to be another Java like implementation (interpreter and runtime
differences aside), and right now lighter weight - limited single
generation inheritance or composition based OOP mixed with functional
programming are becoming the standard.  And while like Python, PHP’s
functions are first class citizens and could be written functionally,
languages like Go or Python’s ease of use and structure are more appealing.

That said, PHP is not going anywhere.  While it has fallen in 7 years from
the 5th most popular language to the 10th, most of the backend of the web
still runs on it, and it is fully supported and even contributed to by most
of the leading hosting companies.  It is their bread and butter. And really
do languages ever really go away? The first computer I had in the 80's ran
Cobol and we still have systems today that run Cobol and need programmers
to maintain them.

On Sun, Aug 28, 2022 at 5:08 PM Keith Smith via PLUG-discuss <
plug-discuss at lists.phxlinux.org> wrote:

> On 2022-08-28 04:55, Steve Litt via PLUG-discuss wrote:
> > On Sun, 2022-08-28 at 02:23 -0700, Andrew McRobb via PLUG-discuss
> > wrote:
> >>
> >> It has its place in the ecosystem, there is no way around it, but it's
> >> always going to be that language for engineering websites, that's it.
> >
> > What's wrong with that? I remember LAMP, and having to make all sorts
> > of web
> > primatives in Perl that PHP just automatically gives you.
> >
> > SteveT
>
> I did some Perl in 2000.  Seems PHP started to dominate somewhere
> between 2002 and 2004.  Seems a lot of other people liked PHP for some
> reason.  I know I liked it when I first saw it in 2002.
>
> >
> >
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-- 
James

*Linkedin <http://www.linkedin.com/pub/james-h-dugger/15/64b/74a/>*
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