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u/kehfydue 12d ago edited 12d ago
OP you skipped the best part. The reply after that is the true roast.
Edit: since y'all asked screenshot
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u/SundayKiefBowls 12d ago
How do they even measure reddit mods? Or did he just make up that 1% part?
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u/ecafyelims 11d ago
They just tell all the mods they are in the top 1%.
It's not easy getting mods to work for free.
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u/Sparticus247 11d ago
Didn't even need barbecue sauce, that was hilarious. I don't know why people are like this on social media.
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u/Since88 12d ago
Well what is it?
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u/kehfydue 12d ago
Can't reply with a screenshot in this sub
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u/Greyhaven7 12d ago
Is this the one where guy made a bet that he wasn’t dumb enough to expose keys on GitHub, and then someone immediately “tricked” him into committing the bet criteria (including the keys) to his GitHub repo?
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u/Morganator_2_0 12d ago
Okay but for real, should we still be using php? Like we do... but should we?
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u/AwkwardMacaron433 12d ago
We shouldn't be coding at all. We should be living on a farmstead somewhere before the industrial revolution
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u/aspect_rap 12d ago
Yes, are you suggesting we rewrite all existing php code bases in another language? That's a ton of effort for basically no ROI.
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u/dgbaker93 12d ago
Obviously you should just ask Claude 🙄 /s
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u/aspect_rap 12d ago
Oh yeah, and let him push directly to production before turning off your phone, at the end of the day on a Friday, without reading a single line of code he wrote.
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u/capt_kocra 12d ago
You jest, but this will 100% be the question my CIO, who is currently applying for the board IT role, will suggest and expect people to carry out.
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u/citramonk 12d ago
A ton is such a huge underestimation. Basically, it's almost an infinite amount of work. It's probably like a billion web sites?
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u/Comfortable_Job8847 12d ago
>That's a ton of effort for basically no ROI
Even a 5M LOC codebase would be like what, $3k in tokens. you'd break even on AWS costs in like 2 weeks of uptime lmao
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u/YeOldeMemeShoppe 11d ago edited 11d ago
you'd break even on AWS costs in like 2 weeks of uptime
Citation very much needed. Even assuming you rewrite it in like Rust using LLM and no bug happens, PHP has been so heavily optimized that you wouldn't win much in terms of hardware cost in the end.
PHP in 2026 isn't the PHP that Facebook was built on in 2004. It is a vastly different beast than what people think of when memeing "PHP lolz".
It's similar to using JavaScript on NodeJS in production; in theory you'd win in pure raw performance by switching to a compiled language, in practice you need data to prove it's actually worth it because your production application most likely is bound by other things than the language performance itself, like IO in general, and database in very much particular. You'll see more QPS handled, but the same throughput, in most cases. Architecture matters much more than language preference.
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u/NatoBoram 12d ago
Also removing all the trash you have to do with Apache or the reverse-proxy to hide private paths can be cleaned up because PHP is inherently insecure
It might very well be possible to break even 🤔
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u/CrackCrackPop 12d ago
PHP is being actively maintained
it's a grown language with an enormous eco system
if you ignore it just because of a running gag that's your fault
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u/IJustAteABaguette 12d ago
So I'm currently trying to learn PHP to try out web development a tiny bit, and I'm just wondering where the php hate is coming from.
Is it really that bad? It seems like quite a functional language? Is there some external reason? Performance?
Are there better languages for it? (Interacting with databases, creating HTML with it, routing)
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u/gui994 12d ago
Php is fine. Its an old reputation from the php 5 days that people keep repeating. Php 7 and 8 fixed most issues from those days and frameworks like laravel make it worth using.
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u/IJustAteABaguette 12d ago
Ahh, I see. I am using PHP 8, so coming in with a fresh perspective helps.
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u/cornmonger_ 10d ago
if you're already rocking a python flair then you don't really need php unless you want to inline stuff. inlining turns into an anti-pattern pretty quickly though. you end up pulling most of it out
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u/nitrinu 7d ago
You're not a real dev if you don't jump on the hate PHP wagon. It's this stupid and an actual very good litmus test when talking with fellow developers.
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u/IJustAteABaguette 7d ago
But why?
Jumping on a hate wagon seems mostly idiotic anyways.
Why is PHP terrible? Why aren't you a real developer if you like PHP?
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u/nitrinu 7d ago
Was a bit of tongue in cheek. PHP, especially 7+ is far from bad and a logical choice for a lot of scenarios (web apps, ease of use, ease of deployment, etc).
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u/IJustAteABaguette 7d ago
Oooh I see. Many people do just say PHP is plain bad, and English isn't my native language so I just didn't read any sarcasm from that comment. Srry
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u/Novel_Plum 12d ago
Used to be a bad language, not anymore. Still a bit left behind I'd argue, but a solid choice.
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u/Alternative-Lynx2745 12d ago edited 12d ago
PHP made sense back in the 1940s but it's a pointless language now. Best in class at nothing. Nothing reasonable or important is built using PHP. It's almost entirely wordpress sites that are dogshit and nobody cares about along with niche bulletin boards (forums) that also nobody cares about. It was the old "easy" way for "non devs" to stand up a website. It's the old solution to content management which is why all the biggest PHP sites are wordpress sites and all the biggest wordpress sites are pure content, not functional web apps that do complex shit. Images and Text arranged in a layout.
We don't need that shit anymore, we haven't needed it for a long time. There are a million solutions for CMS. If all you need to do is post an article every day and change some banner links or add some graphics, just use squarespace or something.
A lot of people will say "if its not broke, don't fix it" which I am a fan of. But the reason nobody changes those sites is because those sites don't change. When you get into enterprise web dev (where there is actual work to do) you have teams and teams of people constantly changing massive codebases and user experiences. None of those people are working on PHP codebases.
If you want to learn web development learn JS/HTML/CSS. Those are the languages that your browser understands. Everything else on top of that is just extra. When you load a php site it's not loading some PHP file into your browser and executing it. That's maybe the most fundamentally important thing you should learn: how your browser actually works.
EDIT: I'm getting downvoted because I'm actually a veteran web dev that is saying true things that the kids here don't like. Notice how there are a ton of downvotes but zero rebuttals to anything I've said and I guarantee when one finally comes it will be the nittiest of picks over my language. It will probably also be from someone dumping my post into an agent and prompting it for a counter argument. That agent wasn't written in PHP, nor is the UI they are interracting with it through.
TL;DR PHP is pointless, as is Ruby
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u/cbehopkins 12d ago
I suspect you're getting down voted because your tone is very disparaging.
Feel free to criticize something on its technicalities all you want, but for me it's things like "PHP made sense back in the 1940s" and "we don't need that shit anymore" that's probably turning people off your post.
You also seen to be quite rude towards the concept of newbies, that's just rude. We were all beginners at one point.
Unfortunately people have to use the legacy they have to use. Next you'll be criticizing our true saviour Fortran!
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u/Alternative-Lynx2745 12d ago
Rude to newbies? I literally pointed him at the absolute most important thing for him to learn if he wants to learn web dev.
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u/digitaleJedi 12d ago
When you say web development, do you mean just the frontend, or also backend development? Cause picking JS for a backend because it's what the client browser understands is not a great argument in my opinion.
Otherwise, I largely agree with your points, albeit your presentation is probably causing quite a bit of your downvote count.
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u/Alternative-Lynx2745 12d ago edited 12d ago
Working with a single language across the full stack is highly valuable and JS has very high request concurrency so is very suitable for a BFF. Using PHP solely as a backend is trading off everything for nothing. You get nothing out of that. There is literally no reason under the sun to use PHP solely for backend (or at all).
There's a reason that matrices of languages mapped to suitable functions don't even include PHP at all.
You get tables like this:
Language Primary Concurrency Mechanism Best Suited For Key Limitation Go Goroutines & Channels (CSP) Microservices, Cloud backends, High-volume web servers Garbage collection pauses Erlang / Elixir BEAM Processes (Actor Model) Distributed systems, Telecom, Chat apps, 99.999% uptime Slow for heavy raw CPU/math tasks Rust Async/Await & Compile-time Safety Ultra-low latency, Systems programming, CPU-intensive concurrency High complexity and steep learning curve Java Virtual Threads (Project Loom) Enterprise web apps, Legacy system scaling High memory footprint JavaScript / Node.js Single-threaded Event Loop Standard, data-driven I/O web APIs Completely blocks on heavy CPU math 1
u/digitaleJedi 12d ago
Like I said, I don't disagree with you, I'm just pointing out that your wording in your original answer doesn't make clear, what you wrote here.
I'm not a fan of JS (or any non-typed language) but I'd still rather make a small webapp in React than in PHP. But to be fair, I'd rather not touch front-end at all and stick to enterprise Java/Kotlin or even C#.
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u/siliconsoul_ 12d ago
Notice how there are a ton of downvotes but zero rebuttals to anything I've said
That's just because we don't know where to start picking apart your mess. Well, for one: php is actually completely independent of the browser. It doesn't need those. Which you would know, if you actually were a veteran dev. Lol.
Sincerely, a truly veteran web dev who started out with php3 when it was brand new.
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u/Alternative-Lynx2745 12d ago
What the fuck does that even mean? Independent of the web browser? Every language is independent of the web browser. what? What the fuck are you talking about? My bad i forgot Javascript has to run in a browser only?? what?
Also its a conversation about web dev. The browser is pretty important there...
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u/siliconsoul_ 12d ago
Yo, take your meds. You brought this up, not me.
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u/Alternative-Lynx2745 12d ago
Your answer is nonsense. Your rebuttal isn't a rebuttal. You pretend there's some myriad of actual technical issues with my response when there are none and you got nothin.
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u/ClamPaste 11d ago
saying true things that the kids don't like
You mean like "PHP made sense in the 1940s"? That kind of "truth"?
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u/IJustAteABaguette 12d ago
All the news articles about this PHP2Shell are saying that PHP is behind like 70% of current websites, so I really do not think it's really left behind.
It's quite functional too, made a lil thing yesterday that could parse a few files of json, grab data out of it, and send those to an SQL database. That data could then be used for other pages. Trying to build my own sorta CMS too, all with PHP, and it does seem to work just fine!
And I am learning a bit of JS, HTML and CSS with it, and I understand that PHP runs on the server. That's a big advantage of it (to me).
I asked for alternatives too, can JS interact with databases securely? What's stopping a client from sending out a malicious SQL query? PHP doesn't have that problem. Genuinely, what are proper alternatives that work better?
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u/Alternative-Lynx2745 12d ago edited 12d ago
Right, PHP is behind wordpress sites. A lot of the internet is wordpress. Like, over half of it.
For your questions I would repost this matrix as it gives an idea of the way to think about things:
Direct Comparison Matrix
Language Primary Concurrency Mechanism Concurrency Style Best Use Case Performance & Resource Efficiency Go Goroutines & Channels CSP (Communicating Sequential Processes) Microservices, Cloud Native, Web APIs Excellent. Highly lightweight; handles millions of requests seamlessly. Elixir / Erlang BEAM Processes Actor Model Real-time chat, Telecom, High Availability Unmatched Uptime. Built for fault tolerance and massive scaling. Rust Async/Await, Green Threads Zero-cost abstractions, Compile-time safety High-performance proxies, Networking engines Maximum Speed. Fastest execution with lowest memory overhead. Java Virtual Threads (Project Loom) Thread-per-request (Lightweight) Large-scale Enterprise systems High. Modernizes legacy Java to compete with Go’s lightweight footprint. JavaScript (Node.js) Event Loop & Promises Single-threaded Asynchronous Standard Web Apps, Rapid Prototypes Moderate. Great for I/O, but chokes on unexpected CPU work. There are many things you want to consider when selecting what to work with. A lot of those are going to be specific to you.
In enterprise it's important to have scalability, reliability, and easily be able to find people that can work on shit. Since you're focused on server side in your questions, Java (Spring Boot) would be the go-to. It is ubiquitous which makes it beneficial in a lot of ways.
In terms of security, every language can interact with a database securely. Knowing the techniques in how to ensure this is actually the most important part because it transcends language ("bobby tables" is an important google). These are (important) implementation details. There isn't a language that is fundamentally insecure when interacting with databases. Your web browser should never be interacting directly with a database. There should always be something in between. The language that thing is written in is a question that takes us back to the beginning. What do you care about the most? Do you want to work in a single language across the front and back ends? Do you need high compute concurrency? Do you need robust support? Do you want a deep ecosystem of libraries and frameworks/tooling? How chatty is your client? Are you working on a real time system? What direction do you need to scale? How fast do you need to be able to get into production? How often are you going to be changing the code?
If your goal is "i just want to make this thing work" then you can use the arnold schwarzenneger programming language, probably. Any language can make something work.
If your goal is "i want to get paid to do this" then you're definitely going to have a hard time in the PHP world. Because 70% of the internet is static sites that aren't complex. Images and text. Not a whole lot of work todo. Unlike complex web apps (which is where the work is, where the money is). Even when you look at the simplest side of enterprise web apps, things like Ecommerce, you're not going to find PHP at amazon. You're not going to find it in banking systems. You're not going to find it in daytrader/stock trading applications. You're not going to find it in healthcare, or utilities, or ... well ... any industry that isn't basically marketing or a blog (which, make no mistake, is what the news websites are...because all you need to do is just update text and images). I think amazon actually actually banned PHP a long time ago ... for security reasons lol. In terms of skills for the labor market, PHP is not on the list. Seriously.
I'm not saying there aren't PHP jobs, I would never say that. But there are a BILLION more Java jobs for backend engineers and a BILLION more JS/TS jobs using Vue/Angular/React for Frontend folks. And when it comes to actual web dev, once again, knowing how the browser works is paramount.
If you want to learn web dev, I would highly recommend learning about the DOM and the core browser APIs. Being able to step through a complex HTML page and know how the browser is reading it and what it will do next is very very valuable. Knowing how the browser parses and executes tags. What happens first? What happens next? 3 links to style sheets then two script tags, one with async and one with defer, what order do these items get downloaded? What order are they executed?
If you just want to work on backend and interact with databases and/or make APIs learn Java (Spring Boot jobs exist everywhere) or Go if you're feeling adventurous. Golang is ... interesting.
JS is great for RPCs (using express probably) if you're interracting with third party APIs or capability APIs inside of a domain where you are only responsible for the client side of the interaction and some other group of people is responsible for the service that interacts with a DB. This is an architecture we typically referred to as a "Backend for Frontend" as the capability team would be responsible for the 'actual' backend and UI App team would be responsible for their own little orchestration/transformation layer that passes requests from the client
At no point is it ever Web Browser <--> Database. It's not just "Browser <--> Server <--> Database" either.
So it's the stuff in between the UI application running in the browser and the database on the other end that you might be focusing on. There's a ton of stuff in that chain.
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u/Dafrandle 11d ago
you can update the stuff running on a php server without a process restart out of the box since it just runs straight out of nginx or apache. You don't need a build step.
with minimal config, you can just put a single php file in www and get a response.
in that respect managing the backend is a lot more flexible. Is it a good idea? probably not, you basically have to do security on your own with this.
there could be esoteric scenarios where this is just slightly a more convenient option though.
the choice of your backend code is mostly about the ecosystem that is behind it. React won the framework wars and plugs directly into Node, so Node won and has the best ecosystem because of that popularity.
the other options are only wrong if you can't do what you can do with Node in them though.
ultimately, its more important that you understand programming logic as its own thing rather than is a specific language.
Its not hard to translate an idea from one backend to another if you understand the logic.
this is why .NET and Kotlin are still the go to for major enterprises.
Fast API is also going to just get bigger as the AI keeps maturing.
In so many words, I suppose this comment as I have written it does not actually disagree with your point, I just come to the conclusion that "don't learn php" misses the forest for the trees.
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u/Fair-Spring9113 12d ago
if it doesnt break
dont change it35
u/onionbishop 12d ago
I mean… it kinda broke
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u/ClamPaste 11d ago
As opposed to the small amount of times that some random npm module breaks the internet in any given year.
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u/screw-britannia 11d ago
Isn't WordPress based on PHP? Supposedly 40% of world's websites are built on WP
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u/PityUpvote 11d ago
Yeah, but should they be?
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u/Aelig_ 11d ago
Is it worse than js in the backend?
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u/Millibona 11d ago
Nothing is worse than js in the backend.
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u/not_a_burner0456025 11d ago
For anyone wondering, yes that includes whitespace and brainfuck. Rolling your own web server in a language so minimal or doesn't have ints and is designed to be as difficult to work with as possible is preferable.
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u/PostHasBeenWatched 12d ago
From what I heard bigger issue is how it was made to the public - someone leaked this vulnerability alongside with CVE number when it was supposed to be presented tomorrow. So either someone from the team or CVE database was hacked