PHP, The elephant that doesn't fall!

Photo by Ben Griffiths on Unsplash

PHP is a language widely applauded and at the same time criticized by others, some say it is dying but is it really, is it worth taking time and studying PHP?

PHP

PHP is a programming language developed by Rasmus Lerdorf in the 90s, originally it was developed to be a server side language helping with HTML, CSS and JavaScript technologies to have dynamic and interactive websites. But PHP was widely embraced due to the beginning of the expansion of the Web and the easy understanding with the MySQL Database.

PHP is currently at version 8.3.6, and it is a language that despite having grown in several other ways of applicability. In addition to being widely used on the Web, it also has tools for creating Desktop applications such as PHP-GTK, it is possible to develop graphical interfaces (GUIs) for desktop applications, although this approach is less common.

PHP and the Web

Talking about PHP and not linking your assets to the web is considered a crime. PHP is a language that is present on 80% of web pages, that's exactly what you read, 80% of that speaking if the web has at least 1.1 billion, then we have around 880 million websites using PHP.

But why is Php used so much?

• WordPress and CRM's: the great growth of Php comes because of the CRMs that exist made with Php, which makes life easier for many people and makes it widely used, becoming one in 5 websites can easily find a website or blog made using a PHP CRM.

• Strong Community: PHP is a language that is around 30 years old and in the process it has fascinated thousands of people and given money to several people who have impacted their lives. And this link provided many supporters for this Elefante Azul community, since PHP is Open Source, this changes a lot in terms of maintenance, resolution of many bugs, generating vast support in forums, tutorials and code repositories.

• Mature Frameworks and Tools: Popular frameworks such as Laravel, Symfony and CodeIgniter enable the development of robust, secure and scalable web applications. These tools increase developers' productivity by providing solutions to many common problems such as authentication, routing, and database manipulation.

• Improved Performance and Scalability: PHP 7 brought a notable performance increase compared to previous versions, making it competitive in terms of speed and efficiency. Combined with caching tools like OPcache, and servers like Nginx or Apache, PHP can be optimized to handle large volumes of traffic.

• Ease of Learning and Use: PHP is easy to learn for beginners, with a relatively low learning curve. The simplicity in syntax and the ability to be integrated directly into HTML files make creating dynamic pages very accessible, and it is easily integrated with client-side tools.

Will this Elephant ever fall?

Listening the reasons why PHP is at the top of this tree is an impossible task since there are many phenomena behind it, but the truth is absolute that PHP will stay there for a long time since despite being functional it also has delivered some things that were asked of you.
Today the web is going down a less monolithic path and more towards micro-services, which could be a disadvantage for PHP, but this is ambiguous and not absolute and PHP has certainly adapted well to this too. So this elephant won't fall so easily.

Yes, we can take time and study PHP and it will be worth it, given that there is a market, but we must take into account other factors when deciding to invest time in something, in your case would you invest time?

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