Is PHP dead? What is the job outlook and future of PHP in the next five years?
PHP is far from dead. Since we get similar questions all the time, I am just going to repeat an answer from another discussion.
Is PHP still relevant as of 2019?
COBOL, a 1959 dinosaur language deployed on few tens of thousands installations is still relevant in 2019.
PHP is actively developed on 2019 and deployed on several hundreds of millions installations.
Therefore even just the “still widely used in many web apps” is plenty enough to justify learning it.
Plus, PHP is so easy to learn and used everywhere that not knowing it is:
- a bad reference on your curriculum,
- like not knowing any shell or bash command. Sure, you can ignore those but it shows the moment you are assigned some simple tasks. Your boss will know. Your colleagues will know.
Is PHP good for anything?
PHP, especially after
version 7.0, is fast, simple, very syntax rich. It comes with embedded
security libraries while being the cheapest language available on every
host provider.
PHP runs on multiple CPU cores (Node.js needs additional work) and can be used both as sync and async (like Node.js) with an additional script.
PHP runs on multiple CPU cores (Node.js needs additional work) and can be used both as sync and async (like Node.js) with an additional script.
PHP implements type
hinting, interfaces, facades, traits, singletons, closures, structured
exceptions, generic containers, iterators, namespaces, packages
(Composer, akin to npm), unit tests, continuous integration…
It comes with thousands of packaged (and stand-alone) libraries, MVC / REST frameworks. Some, in example Laravel, are an industry standard.
And all of this can be learned one bit at a time, because basic PHP is as simple as writing “
As such, you can find cheap PHP developers everywhere in the world, not just in California.
It comes with thousands of packaged (and stand-alone) libraries, MVC / REST frameworks. Some, in example Laravel, are an industry standard.
And all of this can be learned one bit at a time, because basic PHP is as simple as writing “
print(“Hello world”);”. Even a child can learn PHP.As such, you can find cheap PHP developers everywhere in the world, not just in California.
Sure, with immense
quantity, comes a immense range of quality. Therefore it’s plenty
possible to find a bad PHP coder or an excellent coder. Companies may
help themselves with the help of online PHP perspective developers check/interview tools.
Is PHP still growing?
PHP powers the hugest majority of the websites in the world. By far. This is thanks to some “giant” applications like WordPress or very large “users” (Facebook and many others).
When not used
as async, event driven model, base PHP faces upper limits on the amount
of concurrent website hits that are below Node.js, Go and Scala. Not
using PHP as async, event driven model allows to quickly and easily
create complex applications that are still more than fast enough to be
used by large enterprises.
When used with async model, its speed grows as shown in the chart below (created on old PHP 5.x, that ran at half speed vs what PHP 7.x runs today):
When used with async model, its speed grows as shown in the chart below (created on old PHP 5.x, that ran at half speed vs what PHP 7.x runs today):
These hits were
achieved by using Symfony, a very feature rich but very slow framework.
By using one of many PHP API backend optimized frameworks (Lithium,
Lumen, Fat Free Framework…) speed more than doubles.
Here is a more recent chart, featuring PHP 7.0 performance by switching model:
PHP 7.2 is about 5% faster than PHP 7.0 featured on the chart.
Since achieving
enterprise grade, ultra-massive throughput (a la YouTube-Netflix-Amazon
scale) involves a whole re-thinking of data centers, servers, services
stacks and so on, the embedded costs of using async PHP or another
solution become just “one of many balance voices” in the whole project.
In case the above is
still not enough, Facebook developed both a PHP compiler and a PHP
virtual machine (HHVM) to further improve performance. Facebook is
perhaps the most known PHP “business card”, it’s the living proof of a
modern and ever evolving, ultra-massive website that runs the PHP
language.
Conclusion
I hope by reading the post above you understand why PHP is here to stay and be relevant for many years to come:
- Easy to learn
- Very rich, both on syntax features and constructs
- Easy to find everywhere, on any hosting, with no additional costs
- Huge amount of third party libraries, packages, tutorials, books
- Cheapest costs of all
- Cheapest, easiest to find developers for your company
- Even in default configuration, more than adequate for all but the most demanding heavy usage. With additional effort, able to scale up to Facebook levels.
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