Is PHP the new JavaScript?

[@TheHronar]

It's not just Laravel. PHP has been consistently getting better and better. With every update they've been adding more and more features that developers expect from modern programming languages and frankly, the synchronous nature of PHP and the way it is executed makes it exceptionally good for rapid development for small to medium business and frankly, even at the larger companies I've worked at PHP still worked for 90% of cases. Those 10% where it didn't, we just slot in some Go and forget about it.

[@kurshadqaya1684]

Can you elaborate these 10% part and how you solved with go? It is very interesting to me. Thanks in advance.

[@cherry-55]

The feature PHP has for me is immutability of everything except objects by default (strings and arrays use copy-on-write approach, other simple types just passed by value by default and kept in stack inside zval) and statelessness by default. Big stdlib, c-like syntax and Java-like OOP is also something some people like.

[@cherry-55]

@@kurshadqaya1684erm… you can just build a separate (micro)service in go where you need execute stuff faster in terms of cpu or/and in different threads in terms of I/O. Some people even go on long rewrite of whole monoliths from php to microservices in node.js or go for whatever reason they think they need to.

[@TheHronar]

@@kurshadqaya1684 Sure! For extremely intensive processes that a slower, interpreted language like PHP isn't really suitable for I will program that functionality in Go and expose this with an HTTP server that PHP can hit locally, or from another server if necessary. An example of something that I have used Go for is handling real time connections to a web chat interface. PHP isn't especially good at handling persistent connections. Go is excellent at this and can handle thousands of simultaneous connections on a small VPS. This site was a Laravel App and the client had no desire to transition to Go entirely, because of the benefits that Laravel afforded us in other parts of their operation. So I served the chat app through Laravel and used Go to manage the connections.

[@TheHronar]

@@cherry-55 Immutability is definitely something that can be a real struggle with Javascript.

[@kencalvins7221]

I look forward to seeing countries in Africa having strong Laravel communities. PHP gets beautiful by day! More support from Kenya Josh!

[@joeyboli]

Hey From Ghana Here! Nice to meet you !

[@pythonantole9892]

254 tuko wengi kwa PHP.

[@blessdarah1256]

We have them. We use laravel and PHP even more

[@bencroacademy]

Damn I invite all you guys to our🎉 laravel community

[@babuamos8264]

@@bencroacademy ata mimi niko apa

[@rallisf1]

JS is all about component abstraction, multiple backends, microservices, serverless, and all this crap 99.9% of web sites/apps do not need. Laravel is a good old PHP monolith that can you can sugar coat with a JS front-end if you want to. It is so good a concept that all JS frameworks had to copy it (Next/Nuxt/SvelteKit) and even promote SSR. P.S. Yes, you can do modern stuff with Laravel/PHP like deploy to serverless and/or microservices, but nobody cares. P.S.2. I mostly use SvelteKit.

[@nasko235679]

Man I remember day 1 when I first initialized a laravel project.. I thought it would be impossible for me to learn. And now it all feels so intuitive and easy. To anyone looking to give it a shot I'd say - give it at least a solid 2 weeks and once it clicks you will never want to go back!

[@Etcher]

Spot on. That was my exact experience also.

[@0ni0ng0ld-g6i]

Laravel saved my hope for web development, can’t imagine going back to fullstack js

[@pratikbhujel]

The fact that I started to learn Laravel around the same time as you did and yet you are way way ahead of me tells something, something I am doing wrong. Thanks for the content.

[@joshcirre]

On the contrary! I am probably not ahead of you as much as you think. There's so much I don't know. :) Keep it up!

[@brunoggdev6305]

Great stuff man, congrats

[@druganov962]

I use react as my front end and laravel as the backend and inertia for the glue with SSR, and I don’t want anything else☺️

[@razeft]

When I learned to program it was the era of Javascript, everywhere on the web it was recommended to learn it because everything was done with JS, so I did and when I tried PHP I didn't find it good, then after a few years they advised me to try PHP and I went on Laracasts, I love PHP now and not only do I find it good as a language but also using Laracast I find it as an excellent framework to work with.

[@DEBUGENTITY]

PHP & laravel are awesome. Why people hates them i didn't understand.. They offer everything in one package. Still peoples hates it. I think they r just jealous of PHP. 😂

[@JoeSmith-kn5wo]

I don't let the haters affect me. I use the best tool for the job. That's my view.😉

[@DEBUGENTITY]

@@JoeSmith-kn5wo same here. I use wordpress & laravel for all my projects. I dont want to make auth from scratch everytime. So i prefer laravel

[@CoolestPossibleName]

There will be haters no matter what. Some people love go because it's a simple programming language. Some people hate go because it's a simple programming language.

[@nguyenletanful]

Actually, Laravel is revitalizing PHP. :)

[@Joshua-dc4un]

I dislike the PHp language aesthetic

[@Voidstroyer]

The title of the blog post is a bit misleading to be honest. The post is mainly about laravel, and not really php. I don't like php, but laravel is awesome. PHP has indeed improved massively over the years (my first encounter with php was back in 2011/2012, can't really remember), and then I first used it in production in 2014 in my first job modifying some wordpress themes. Then I first used Laravel in production in 2021 (we used Laravel version 8). I am definitely in favor of fullstack frameworks that are oppinionated. It makes it easy to join projects that are already in progress. Laravel definitely makes that easy. Javascript frameworks tend to have too much flexibility where if you join a new Javascript project you really don't know what you are getting yourself into. The flexibility is a massive, very sharp, double-edged sword.

[@DevNightly]

I'm loving Laravel since I started version 7, things just got easier and more fun.

[@techrevolution1408]

Laravel is a great framework with lots of built-in features, but it abstracts a lot of the underlying logic. This means developers might miss out on understanding what’s happening under the hood. Also, these heavy abstractions come with a performance cost. While PHP itself is quite fast, Laravel’s abstractions can slow down the startup of even simple applications. Laravel works well for complex applications with low to moderate traffic, but for high-traffic sites, while it can scale, it often results in higher costs on platforms like AWS.

[@ChrisVisserDev]

Switched back in the days from PHP with Laravel 4 to MeteorJS. It took a long time for JS to catch up the serverside of what meteor had for a long time, but with NuxtJS that has shifted again. PHP was grwat, but it lacked the ability of being able to run everywhere and required external scripts for running as background process. JS was just more versatile and that pushed me into JS. Now that JS is maturing, there really is no reason to use another language for the server

[@jeremywinst]

im a beginner. i know html, css (struggling a little bit with flexbox and grid sometimes), javascript. Should i learn PHP? What should i do going in 2025 to get a career, realistically? i need help.

[@nelisco9797]

Hmm I'm not an expert but you need to stick to one language (e.g Js) and master it very well. Moving to PHP later will be very very simple! Start building projects. Watch and practice some simple projects coding online. Above all be patient and persistent! Don't stay a day without coding 😊

[@gavipk]

No large code base application should ever be written in parsed scripting languages.

[@jamesgphillips91]

So... i started with js and worked as a react dev. I took a side project in Larvel Vue monorepo. The funny thing about this, is the strongest thing about Laravel is the strength of Rails. You get amazing cli commands that just generate your code. With that said, these technologies are for monoliths and do not mee the same use cases serverless javascript apps. Most companies only need a monolith, but its not what big orgs are doing and VC is going to continue funding companies that rely on cloud credits to scale massives serverless apps. IMPO loco, a rust framework emulating rails, is a better choice.

[@Etcher]

About time PHP got the kudos it deserves. The modern JS ecosystem is a laughable mess. The tooling alone for any kind of basic project is beyond a joke and don't get me started on the bloat that is React. PHP and Laravel keep things nice and simple - a good old server-side MVC with a nice templating language for the front-end and with things like Livewire and Inertia you can build really impressive SPAs if that's your bag.

[@manfroma]

Welcome to the club.

[@JavierArcheni]

One interesting thing about the article is that Dave relies on AI to create his examples. OK, that could be valid for other technologies, but it adds a lot of extra points to the Laravel's developer-friendly ecosystem (documentation, packages, community...)

[@bartech101]

PHP was always good for the time. And as said it was so easy to use almost anyone could do something in it. So blaming bad code on PHP was unfair.

[@UeharaKeitaro上原恵太郎]

With the amount of tooling, seems like it.

[@pookiepats]

Yes seriously. The odd thing is if you strip it all away, modern PHP is still extremely productive, relatively performant (especially for serving html) and has type safety. Being native to the server and the direct markup integration means ideas can come to life for not just you but the public web in extremely short order. Javascript for all its features and ubiquitous platform support still cannot make this claim. PHP is like server side jsx that doesnt suck to read. Lastly, while Laravel is awesome I actually don’t prefer it to projects like Kirby CMS that opt for vanilla PHP (another great example of what can be achieved without a framework is Dolibarr). There’s something beautiful about not slathering on 15 layers of abstraction straight out of the gate.

[@TheHronar]

@@pookiepats Exactly. Modern PHP out of the box already does what Typescript has been doing for JS. Without Typescript, JS doesn't have type safety and immutability is more difficult. You get those tools for free with modern PHP as well as a language and runtime that was actually designed to be a performant backend.

[@MrManafon]

While its amazing to see PHP back in good graces of the internet, it is kinda sad to hear the "laravel happened" narrative. Laravel in this form existed in 2014 as well. Symfony did these same things before that. There never was a "lack of guardrails", not any more so than in JavaScript. The only thing that changed is that you, individual developer, didn't have a chance to see that sort of coding in 2010. But it did exist, in fact not much has actually changed since PHP5.4. Yes, its faster and the runtime type checks are safer, and a thousand other things, but it is the same language, deployed the same way, with the same mature tooling and the same amazing community spearheaded by the Laravel folks. The only thing that really changed is you.

[@ouissler]

I agree, I thought about Symfony as soon as he started reading. Laravel is awesome, but there are still some heavy duty Symfony libraries under the hood. I remember using Symfony as far back as 2008 and you could feel the difference straight away.

[@Etcher]

100%! Well said. I was writing apps in Code Igniter back in 2010 and some of those were generating lots of money for various businesses. Laravel was a really nice step up from CI but as you said back in 2014 Laravel was delivery the ease of development it delivers now just as impressively. I love Laravel. It puts food on my table and I love working in it everyday.

[@Coding_Junkie]

The syntax makes a little more sense to me. Plus, why can’t JS do date functions as simple as PHP 😆

[@Malcolm777-i]

I love both

[@coderzilla]

Oh my, I am on the right path. :)

[@TheKennyWorld]

Raw php has its good uses

[@kouceylahadji]

I dont know how feel a Laravel developer switch to JS😆

[@hermessantos5258]

Well, Laravel is awesome, but all I find on internet freelances are those home.php projects, where everything is crammed into one horrible file, including the database connection and SQL queries. I mean, PHP and Laravel are really awesome technologies, but the software built with them is often poorly designed. This isn't necessarily the case with Java or C#, which force developers to have a more structured approach. I'm not defending Java, C#, or JS, but the reality is that PHP doesn't naturally encourage software to be maintainable.

[@genechristiansomoza4931]

I do not have issues using php. It is easy to use.

[@felr1b]

It's bizarre thinking that I use Laravel since v3 lol

[@leonardk2805]

niubai here 🎉 *newbie

[@sachinmohite217]

Laravel is really making PHP fun again..

[@abrahamibrahimovic2866]

Even though I like Laravel. I still prefer Symfony. More structured, better ORM, superior forms system, better ORM, Turbo Integration, and last but not least the API-Platform and the better docs. For big and professional projects, I would always prefer Symfony over Laravel. If you just know Symfony from 10 or 15 years ago, you should give it a try, because that is what professional PHP devs use nowadays

[@anasouardini]

WASM is the future 🤓

[@stonedoubt]

Y’all say that about PHP but I was building monster apps before node was even heard of.

[@dansouza1623]

Swoole is way faster than nodejs

[@BrunoBernard-kn6vt]

Installing laravel is like a breeze 😂

[@Joshua.Developer]

JS and it's entire ecosystem is horrible I was learning nothing. I found ELM and functional programming never looked back. And I just found Laravel ... wow who would have thought MVC is a more proper way of making software not the jumbled mess FrontEnds keep reinventing.

[@adamtang5148]

It was sucks. Now may be better but it was sucks.

[@wwloyd]

just no...

[@meowish952]

Nope. Javascript is the goat if you want to land a job

[@V8Li]

You’re making things worse

[@joshcirre]

I'm sorry. 😅

[@balodoc]

PHP is actually dead, same as JS

[@scott_itall8638]

How so? Sounds like a skill issue.

[@genechristiansomoza4931]

In your dreams. I'm using php just fine.

[@mhondoroinc1768]

@@genechristiansomoza4931 Look at the views on php tutorials. It’s easy to repeat what we have heard and not what we know. Who told you that php is dead?

[@balodoc]

@@mhondoroinc1768 ur mom

[@balodoc]

@@genechristiansomoza4931 php is for noobs