PHP Is Not Dead. It Grew Up.
People have been calling PHP dead for about fifteen years. PHP has been paying my bills for over twenty. One of us is confused, and it is not PHP.
I started in PHP in the early days, when you mixed your SQL right into your HTML and called it architecture. I have run it in production ever since, including a decade as a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) in the credit monitoring space, with 7M+ monthly queries and 10,000 clients running on it.
PHP 8 is not the language people joke about
Modern PHP has strict types. It has enums, readonly properties, fibers, and a JIT. It has Composer and one of the best package ecosystems in the business.
The PHP people mock is from 2005. That PHP is dead. They are right about that one. They just missed the funeral and the rebirth.
Laravel is what maturity looks like
I have run Laravel in production for 10+ years. It took the lessons of every framework that came before it and made them boring in the best way. Queues, caching, testing, deployment. Solved problems, shipped daily.
Boring is a compliment when payroll depends on it.
Why I would still bet a company on it
- It hires well. Millions of developers know it.
- It ships fast. Idea to production in days, not quarters.
- It scales fine. We proved that. Your bottleneck is your database and your decisions, not the language.
I am building Bin X right now, software for bin rental operators, and I run Eco Moving Utah on the side of it. When I need something new, I still reach for the stack that never missed a payment.
I listed the ten PHP people I would follow in a post on my LinkedIn. Follow the people who build the tools, not the people who bury them every year.
Trust but verify. PHP verified.
About the author
I am a self-taught developer currently in Salt Lake City. Currently, work in Laravel but have experience in plain PHP, PERL, and CakePHP.
Entrepreneurial VP of tech and CTO with a strong grasp of both the business and engineering. PHP developer for 10 years with experience in CakePHP and Laravel
Comments
Join the discussionThe 'boring in the best way' line landed well — a decade with Laravel and the surrounding tooling is exactly the kind of stability that lets a team ship instead of re-platforming. Your point that the bottleneck is usually the database or the decisions, not the language, rings true too. The 2005 eulogy detail is a nice touch: fifteen years of being declared dead while quietly paying the bills is a strong rebuttal on its own.
