Is PHP Dead?

In short:

I’m writing this to ask, one more time in 2024, that old “Is PHP dead?” question , the one that crept into our lives in the 2010s and still gets used to farm followers and engagement on social media , and to take a small nostalgia tour along the way.

What Does It Mean for a Language to Die?

Before I start, I think it is better to define death first.

For a language to die, development on it first has to stop. Then new projects built with it have to slow down or end. Once those two things happen, the rest , “closed to innovation”, “can’t keep up”, “lost its modernity” , complete themselves automatically.

Any language outside these conditions has not died, even if only a handful of people still use it.

So, What About PHP?

Now that we have pinned down what death and a dead language mean, let’s take PHP and pull the calendar back to 2005. Maybe a lot of you were still a twinkle in your father’s eye back then :) but to understand how a process ends, it helps to know how it began, so we have to go this far back.

If we look at the debates of that period:

• the rise and heavy buzz of what we called web 2.0 [1][2][3],
• social media platforms starting to settle into our lives [1],
• Google starting to grow [1][2][3][4],
• e-commerce starting to enter our lives [1][2] ,
• a technology like ajax spreading across the web [1][2][3]

if we define it as the period when all of this began, we wouldn’t be making a mistake.

PHP, in that period, could not keep up with these needs with its current version, and even when it could, it did not solve them in a developer friendly , that is, developer-friendly , way.

So naturally, we were expecting signs of modernization from PHP. And in the same years, version 5.0 was announced.

With this version:

• OOP entered the language,
• we met PDO,
• error handling was improved,
• DOM and XML parsing were improved,
• MySQL support became built-in,
• some performance improvements were made.

I think this release brought very revolutionary features to the language for its time, but it still fell behind the spirit-of-the-age features and developer-friendly touches that frameworks like Ruby On Rails, announced in the same period, brought.

Within the next few years, the “PHP is dead” myth started to get thrown around.

Because from those years up to the 2010s, many languages and frameworks grew in popularity and pulled a lot of php developers toward themselves. Frameworks like Python Django started winking at the web world, NodeJS showed up and made the rules of the game get rewritten, Ruby On Rails kept gaining popularity.

Alongside these:

Even though PHP’s reach kept growing thanks to being used in many open-source projects, it carried this image for a long time , old versions having to be supported, insecure products appearing because of bad coding habits. On top of that, the maintenance and update cost of old code growing and getting harder, PHP’s own pace of development dropping, and even its 6th version never being released and getting shelved , these were all factors in the language losing its popularity, I’d say. (yes, me, personally, included)

I think PHP took a big step to save the situation between version 5.2 and 5.4 but it wasn’t enough, and with version 7, released in 2015, bigger overhauls cleared away most of the language problems I listed above.

By then, riding the hype train, the other languages and frameworks I mentioned were already well into their golden age. At the software house I ran back then, I had also started using languages like NodeJs and .Net beyond PHP, picking the tool for the need. You can also reach my other piece from 2014 where I touched on the subject.

During PHP’s path from version 5.4 up to 7.0, a lot of modern updates and renewals were made, and thanks to that the frameworks giving the language its strength started to develop and move forward. And with composer, released in 2012, an even bigger revolution took shape , we can say it brought order and structure to PHP :)

Right now PHP’s version 8 line is being developed; you can watch the development from https://github.com/php/php-src/commits/master/ and https://www.php.net/releases/. As I was writing this blog post, the last commit was 3 hours ago and some security improvements had been merged into the master branch.

After this short history and nostalgia tour, let’s come to today.

Is It Still Alive?

PHP today is still in use and, even if the frequency of use has dropped, it carries on as a language/platform where new projects are still produced. Its ecosystem develops along the way too, adapts itself simply to what we call “Modern Web Development”, and moves forward. These updates can be criticized, and you can draw conclusions by comparing it with other languages and frameworks, but all of those conclusions and criticisms become useful only when they step outside a purely personal statement. For instance: say a developer who had trouble with PHP in 2014 may have moved to another language and framework , but if in 2024 they still say PHP is dead with their knowledge from back then, that is that person’s own problem.

Those who know me know I’m not a zealot for any one language, because I think acting in a work- and result-oriented way matters. The point isn’t languages; the point is whether claims are made with arguments or without. By the death definition I made at the start, I can say PHP is not dead. As with every other topic in this blog, I chose to write my own opinion and my arguments in this post.

How Much Longer Will It Live?

Instead of giving a rote answer to this, it will be more correct to answer according to the changing age and its needs.

For example, if I answer by taking some of today’s needs:

• More and more applications now require heavy processing for users; seeing this, PHP added the JIT after version 8.0 and became more performant thanks to the advantage it brings. [1][2]
• As the importance of data and types grows by the day, PHP again added many new language features to version 8.0; union types, named arguments, match expression, attributes , and started giving us developers more flexible and powerful support for writing code.
• With the standardization that formed through frameworks like Symfony and Laravel, teams started building applications faster and stronger,
• For the real-time applications our age requires, tools like Swoole, ReactPHP, frankenPHP started producing high-performance results,
• I don’t even feel the need to bring up things like Docker, since php adapted to it quickly,
• Tools like wordpress and magento, which solve needs like blogs and e-commerce, are still being developed and used,
• PHP has no claim in artificial intelligence, so they don’t push in that direction; so if your goal is AI, there’s no need to insist on PHP , Python will do the job for you,
• Likewise, in things like systems programming, even though tools/frameworks like phar and phalcon showed some promise, they fell behind GO, I’d say; so if your goal is to build high-performance system tools, you can prefer GO.

When you take these points together, I can say PHP can live a good while longer.

In short, a language/framework does not die as long as it keeps striving to answer needs.

Finally

This piece is not one that praises PHP; it is just a piece that takes up the subject of a language dying, specifically through PHP. I too have criticisms about PHP and the frameworks used in many of the projects I’m responsible for, but because I can’t spread these personal matters into a general “PHP is dead”, I wrote this post.

Thanks for reading.

The Turkish version of this piece is here.