This is such a surface-level article. Most of the things listed as advantages exist in other languages as well. Here are some actual reasons to like PHP: 1. Java-like interfaces and classes and strict argument (and soon parameter) typing enforced at runtime 2. Autoloading and "lazy loading" of classes means defining bi-directional relationships between classes/types is painless (this can of course also make you shoot yourself in the foot, but I prefer that to dealing with circular import

Those all seem like features any modern programming language has. Nothing here particularly distinguishes PHP from the rest of the crowd. I don't think anyone is surprised by the fact that PHP has classes and some niche methods integrated in most standard libraries. I would like to go one further and say most other more modern programming languages do each of these better. It's always a good idea to look what is beyond the horizon.

I don’t hate PHP either. I just want to be able to get another job doing something interesting after I spend 18 months at your company. Otherwise I’ll be stuck in the public sector maintaining broken Deloitte unemployment portals, making 1/3rd of what junior coding academy developers make. Easy calculus.

PHP to me is a bit like the new Perl. Sometimes you just need a small script that does one thing well. Took me 10-15 minutes to implement an interface for customer support so they can look up a clients last order based on incoming phone number (via Aircall) or name and surname. FTP'd it to an already existing company server and it just works. And saves them weeks of time over a year probably. Nobody cares that I debugged it via die("error"); With Python I'd be stuck reading the latest tutorial

After reading the PDO section, I started to wonder if the author has used a language other than PHP. How can PHP have the best database integration if the best example you can show are simple prepared statements?

I recently had to work on a PHP codebase. It wasn't a very old one in terms of churn, but it had been around for a while. It was surprisingly clean and well-built from what I could tell, it just got lost in a transition to a new server in a new language. Symfony itself still has some warts in terms of boilerplate but it wasn't difficult to poke around the code. In fact, the most painful bit was setting up on a Mac because the extensions for IMAP and other things weren't easy to add in. That's mo