is PHP really as bad as the internet makes out?

[elabx]

On 12/10/2017 at 6:11 AM, pwired said:

Getting a pension in spain is uncertain and if you get one you get very little paid. Economy in spain is going bad and the social seguridad here tries to cut pensions where they can

Hear you hermano, I've always lived in informal economy. Don't have a cent for pension/retirement. PHP/ProcessWire in my country, serves me well for small to medium sized solutions which is basically what I do right now a quarter of my time, and have a deal with an agency that serves "PW products" to US/Canada which does most of my income.

But in a local company (and with this I include big international business with offices in Mexico) it would be easier to get paid in any other language, PHP have this really bad rep. Also, the US tech scene defines a lot of this, cause most top talent in Mexico ends up in US and if not, a lot of companies have their dev teams outsourced here and haven't heard much about PHP technology being used, at least from the people I know that have migrated/freelance for US companies. 

Talking about overall tech skill, I've seen working with methodologies like Agile things get you on higher wages.

On 12/10/2017 at 6:11 AM, pwired said:

But I see the internet economy growing fast year after year with opportunities, jobs, self employment and money to be made.

My bet on that started with ProcessWire and until now, ups and downs but overall, great success! haha

[qtguru]

On 12/10/2017 at 9:56 AM, szabesz said:

https://processwire.com/talk/topic/17707-php-in-2017-rasmus-lerdorf-wearedevelopers-conference-2017/

You might want to watch it from 02:42
PHP was meant to be a templating language only (which it is still today) on top of the business logic written in C but as it turned out, nobody wanted to write and compile C.

Sure, these days we have better alternatives when it comes to writing code that can be compiled to machine code but it still requires a lot more setup an configuration than to simply use PHP or Perl which are preinstalled on each webserver, ready to be used by writing a few lines of code or installing a CMS or framework in a few minutes. PHP is evolving and it is still a solid option for small or medium sized solutions and I guess 95% of the web belongs to those categories.

Sure, when one is after a career of writing code for big companies (including big governments), PHP might not be the best language to practice. However, freelancers and small companies can still rely solely on PHP as far as running code on the server is concerned.

Hi regardless remember I come from a Third world country,small customers cannot simply afford employing developer of other languages and PHP is quite affordable so far PHP has a market, PHP is still viable and in demand, I was just approaching it on the basis that other compiled language would outperform PHP doesn't mean PHP is irrelevant also I don't have any preference for any language I pick whatever works but i must admit PHP is the only platform that's faster for me to bootstrap and come up with something within a short time. 

 

On 12/10/2017 at 11:51 AM, SamC said:

One ‘issue’ I would say for me learning processwire so far is that I’m not sure how much actual php I’ve learnt. My logic skills have certainly improved, I can see that, but as far as getting a Job as a junior dev with js/php I feel like I’m still so far away! Round here they list requirements that read to me like the requirements for a very experienced dev, not stuff that I’d call “junior”.

To be frank most companies as long as you know PHP to a certain level and you are willing to learn, companies would employ you, there was a time I wasn't familiar with frameworks till I worked for a company and was given a project, I was given a PHP Book on Advanced PHP Development, However the fastest way to pick up PHP is to look up PHP the Right Way.  I would have loved to recommend Symfony Framework, I work for an enterprise organization and we mostly develop in almost any language except PHP but mostly Java Spring Framework and Symfony feels closer to that, Symfony gives so much flexibility and freedom and uses best practice, unlike Laravel, I have issues with the abuse of Static class and some Classes suffer from what I call "God Object", The Eloquent ORM irks me out it has too much logic compared to Doctrine way's of handling data. Here is another good resource for PHP knpuniversity.com, Just take it one day at a time.

 

On 12/10/2017 at 2:38 PM, tpr said:

I agree that if there's no project to start using a new tool can be frustrating. I usually decide what to learn and during the learning process a project usually comes to my mind that could be created/rewritten in it, or at least more fun.

Exactly

[qtguru]

On 11/12/2017 at 8:16 PM, clsource said:

The only benefit of Laravel (And other PHP Frameworks) is they can interact with the ProcessWire API directly (Using composer and namespaces). But that can easily be solved with a simple Rest APi although requires more work

The Benefit of Framework is standardized way of working take for example we use Processwire I know if i need to make a DB call i'd use the Processwire DB Class, that already saves us the stress of trying to understand each other's code since there's already a standard and way, now imagine you were to manage a non-framework project you'd find yourself trying to understand the way it works and also how it works. That's way framework come in, and also best practices also 

[FrancisChung]

On 12/10/2017 at 5:58 AM, Sephiroth said:

it's interpreted every time

I think there are solutions out there that precompiles PHP code into byte code that can be executed if you need that performance boost
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5900037/why-compile-a-php-file

I haven't personally used any of them so I'm also not sure if there are downsides to it. But it's good to know that there are solutions out there you can turn to.