Also probably, like me, you have heard about loads of other new technologies coming out in a short period of time and some time I just go,
"da f*%k should I do now!? do I start learning this straight away or keep practicing my development skills with what I currently know!?"
... and this happens quite often, unfortunately.
Of course, it's always good to learn new things and in fact I threw myself into some other new technologies now, but my true love for PHP will never die.
OK, I am pretty sure that most of you feel the same way or had the same thought at least once during their development career. However, fear not my fellow PHP coders, here are the 3 main reasons why!
Reason #1 - It's being used, and a lot!
Recent PHP market report from w3techs.com shows that 83.1% of all the websites on the net use PHP as their main platform and server side scripting as of the date this article is being published - 31st December 2017.
88.5% of it use PHP version 5 while 10.7% use the new and improved PHP version 7. Some of the big names are using PHP like Facebook, Yahoo and Wikipedia.
Most of the website hosting providers also use PHP as their main backend platform and all of them provide PHP out of the box.
That is somehow very encouraging for most developers that feel comfortable coding with PHP or reached an expert level of coding with PHP.
I do however encourage the switch to PHP 7 as the performance is drastically increased and more secure.
Reason #2 - Competition is still far.
This might sound ridiculous to some who maybe use other technologies as server side scripting, however, as other new technologies evolve over time, PHP ruled the entire market when there was no real, easy alternative for server side scripting.
Since 1995, exactly 22 years ago from today when PHP first appeared, it gained a huge reputation of being the easiest server side scripting to learn and to adapt. Various other versions where produced starting from PHP/FI as "Personal Home Page Tools (PHP Tools) version 1.0" from Rasmus Lerdorf up to version 7 which is the latest release.
- Let's take Ruby for example. Ruby is quite a contender when it come to ease of use and adaptability but it still very far from being as popular as PHP.
- Phyton is also a great programming language that can build really tough website development with. It has been in the market more then PHP but is still struggling to level up with PHP.
- Then there is C#. Major drawback? not an open source programming language which inflicts a major hit in it's popularity.
- JAVA. A beautiful language of which you could create anything you want without never having enough out it. However, it might be an overkill to develop a website with it.
- Can't leave out NodeJS. Slowly becoming a major alternative to PHP with major advantage in performance over PHP. It's javascript base allows the developer to use javascript to communicate with the database and throughout the whole website frontend and backend. Having sad that though, NodeJS still has to make it to the popular market before competing with PHP.
The other major advantage of PHP is support. If you are after a shared hosting most of the hosting companies has PHP installed out of the box while if you are using any other kind language, you might have to request the installation or even buying a dedicated server or cloud hosting to make it work according to your requirements.
Reason #3 - Still the easiest of them all.
Some might review that NodeJS can even compete alone with PHP and in my humble opinion, yes it can. However, one should keep in mind that NodeJS was designed for the real world applications of which in turn need time to develop and requires quite a budget.Despite all of this, PHP did raise to the occasion and launched version 7 which saw a drastic performance improvement and more robust security platform.
I am pretty confident that PHP is keeping up with the test of time and strongly becoming future proof too.
The most important thing however is it's simplicity. They say that simplicity is very complex to achieve but I can shamelessly say that PHP is achieving that with flying colours.
Keep on coding fellow developer and have a lovely new year 2018! ... bring on the beer!
