Why do these discussions always end up in some black/white dicotomy? Are there situations where PHP is a valid part of a tech stack? Sure. Are there places where, if you could choose, PHP is not a good choice in the stack, Yup.
My personal view of it is that it is part of our eco-system and will not go away, how eager some of us may be to have it disappear, so seeing it getting better as a platform should make the world a little better for a lot of people that need to use it in systems that are built with parts in PHP.I cant see how that is a bad thing.
The thing I dont understand is, if you for some reason do not like to use a specific language or tech, why bother trying to convince others not to use it?
Few of the people I worked with have only one tool in their belt, and they can work in any language. We all have some favorable setup that we think is best for us/others to use in order to build better software with quicker iterations. But all of us (hopefully) also know that few, if any, stacks are 100% solid and consistent after a couple of years. There is always some parts that we wish would not exist, some script that magically does stuff that we do not dare to touch, some service that is written in some fancy language by that awesome dev that worked here 10 years ago or some really central part of our software that is written in Python, talking to a module written in C that needs to be compiled with a specific compiler that went dead 4 years ago. Even if we dream about the perfect system that just works (LIKE I WANT IT) and has a fantastic setup, it is only at specific snapshots of time systems work like that. Time, people, organizations, product requirements, marketing efforts, buzz, hacks, fixes, playfulness, boredom etc all makes system degrade over time and while it is important to manage these debts, it is more or less impossible to have a system in a state where it will always have the tech stack you want right now. That way, we will always have to address bugs in PHP, old Python-versions, rage over custom compiled nginx or whatever. Whether or not PHP is a good language or not is a meta-discussion IMO. If languages that are used by a lot of people gets better over time, that is awesome in my book. Having a perfect tech stack with only funny/new/fancy/awesome tech is at best an interesting mind experiment.
As soon as you hit a certain level of complexity in your solution/software/whatever, you will be using multiple languages. You'll have scripts written in Bash, front-ends using PHP, back-ends using C or whatever. You are definitely correct that there is no black and white here, all software just needs to be "good enough" to actually solve a problem and be worth paying for.
If PHP being slow stops you from being "good enough" then it's very likely that you can just isolate the part where PHP isn't doing a good job, re-write that in another language and keep the parts where PHP is working fine.
> The thing I dont understand is, if you for some reason do not like to use a specific language or tech, why bother trying to convince others not to use it?
Because, if others use it, I have a higher chance of also having to use it.
I do not use Java and JS at work because of my like or dislike of these languages; I use them at work because, many years ago, whoever started the project I'm working at chose these languages. Had they chosen Python or Ruby or C# or anything else, I would have to use these languages. And it does not apply only to work: if I want to contribute to the Linux kernel, I have to do it in C; if I want to contribute to LibreOffice, I have to do it in C++; if I want to contribute to MediaWiki, I have to do it in PHP; and so on.
Convincing others to not use a poor language reduces the chance of myself having to deal with it later.
I guess the "poor" in "poor language" is in the eye of the beholder and I get your point. Have you found yourself lucky in convincing the world in not using any language yet?
My personal view of it is that it is part of our eco-system and will not go away, how eager some of us may be to have it disappear, so seeing it getting better as a platform should make the world a little better for a lot of people that need to use it in systems that are built with parts in PHP.I cant see how that is a bad thing.
The thing I dont understand is, if you for some reason do not like to use a specific language or tech, why bother trying to convince others not to use it?
Few of the people I worked with have only one tool in their belt, and they can work in any language. We all have some favorable setup that we think is best for us/others to use in order to build better software with quicker iterations. But all of us (hopefully) also know that few, if any, stacks are 100% solid and consistent after a couple of years. There is always some parts that we wish would not exist, some script that magically does stuff that we do not dare to touch, some service that is written in some fancy language by that awesome dev that worked here 10 years ago or some really central part of our software that is written in Python, talking to a module written in C that needs to be compiled with a specific compiler that went dead 4 years ago. Even if we dream about the perfect system that just works (LIKE I WANT IT) and has a fantastic setup, it is only at specific snapshots of time systems work like that. Time, people, organizations, product requirements, marketing efforts, buzz, hacks, fixes, playfulness, boredom etc all makes system degrade over time and while it is important to manage these debts, it is more or less impossible to have a system in a state where it will always have the tech stack you want right now. That way, we will always have to address bugs in PHP, old Python-versions, rage over custom compiled nginx or whatever. Whether or not PHP is a good language or not is a meta-discussion IMO. If languages that are used by a lot of people gets better over time, that is awesome in my book. Having a perfect tech stack with only funny/new/fancy/awesome tech is at best an interesting mind experiment.