Was anyone else surprised to see Kbin being written in PHP?
I don't know if it's due to over-exposure to programming memes but I certainly believed that no one was starting new PHP projects in 2023 (or 2020, or 2018, or 2012...). I was under the impression we only still discussed it at all because WordPress is still around.
Would a PHP evangelist like to disabuse me of my notions and make an argument for using PHP for projects such as Kbin in this day and age?
Nowadays is only a matter of community and resources related to the language that one can find online. Php lost popularity and gained this image as a bad language, this brings a lot of devs to not use Php without a real factual reason. Is just not cool or they feel ashamed to tell that they work with Php.
If a dev works with typescript is more easy to find a lot of cool and pleasing resources, videos, articles. With php, for the reasons explained above, the stuff you can find it does not feel so cool as other mainstream languages. And here the game start over, for this reason less people use it and so on. This give to the entire php ecosystem a kind of "old" feeling and a lot of young devs just don't like it.
But rarely there are real reasons. With php 8 for sure there are not a lot of reasons to blame the language to be a bad language.
Until a couple of years ago I used to work with the last versions of php and I actually never felt the urges to redactor everything in some other language.
I am sure that php has limits, but in the same way as all other languages have their limits: they are just tools at the end.
Stop blaming php. Blame WordPress instead! :D
But I would ask he opposite question: can somebody make an argument to not use php?
From a dev point of view.