Stupid Question, not an insult: Why is kbin written in PHP?

3 years ago by EthicalAI to c/kbinMeta

Is PHP still a relevant language in today's day and age? I know a LOT of languages and it just never occurred to me to learn this one, because anyone I've ever been aware of writing a backend these days would either choose Node or one of several compiled languages. Lemmy uses Rust for it's backend which is highly desireable, many people would have used Golang in the backend world if they desired performance and compilation, otherwise I don't know why you wouldn't just use Typescript. Makes it hard to contribute to IMO.

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trynn 33 points 3 years ago

Of course PHP is still a relevant language today. It's actively developed and there are several very high profile sites that use PHP, including Facebook, Wikipedia and Wordpress. If Ernest knows PHP well, there's no reason for him not to use it. Developer familiarity trumps language trendiness every time.

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EthicalAI 2 points 3 years ago

Ok good to know. I thought it was kinda a legacy support language. Is it a good developer experience? A lot of languages still in use, like Java, I’d never personally touch with a ten foot pole, and are down trending. So that was more my question: do people still like PHP and is it worth starting a new project with in 2023. Why not use a more popular framework like Node?

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VerifiablyMrWonka 2 points 3 years ago

It's like a very comfortable pair of slippers at this point. On PHP8 and with a decent framework (optional) like Symfony (kbin uses that) or Laravel (opinionated, but puts the R in RAD) I can knock well tested code out far faster than I can with anything else.

I also like a bit of Go or Node but I'm always drawn back to PHP.

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YMS 2 points 3 years ago

Developer familiarity trumps language trendiness every time.

Developer familiarity is a huge pro, of course. But language trendiness is important, too. You can try to code in an obscure language that nobody knows, but you won't get many useful libraries and frameworks and tools there. You can code in a language that once was popular and has most of the libraries you'll need, but it will be hard to find other developers to hire or, like here, voluntarily engage in your project.

PHP is still popular enough that these won't really be problems here, but there sure are cases where developer familiarity won't beat language trendiness because it will result in much more work or much less helpers.

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