This just reminds me of what originally got me into PHP as a teenager. Creating a site for our gaming community in PHP-Nuke was all too easy. Extending it with plugins, and eventually writing my own plugins to show live data from our game server.
Now I look back on PHP3/PHP4 with disgust. Globals, function names, massive pieces of code right in the middle of HTML, shell_exec.
> Globals, function names, massive pieces of code right in the middle of HTML, shell_exec.
And they're not inherently bad.
PHP made the internet fun. Anyone could get going with a PHP enabled host with by creating an HTML document starting with <?php> and have a working something that the world could see by end of the day.
Today's web development feels like such a drag. In that you need to choose the scaffolding, create the scaffolding, wait for the concrete to dry, drill holes for the infrastructure and then construct the infrastructure.
When you then go to connect the infrastructure you find that one of the girders has buckled which requires a patch-up or refactor. Someone's misprinted the blue-prints and the cable ferret has gotten lost down one of the connectivity holes. You then discover that a new scaffolding company has come to town so your construction is now obviously out of date.
PHP enabled you to have something cool in days. Nowadays you spend days just trying to setup react. my two cents.
This matches my experience. In the old days (mid-2000's) I did a ton of PHP freelance work. This was done mostly with home grown "frameworks", built around HTML form to MySQL database mapping and CRUD operations. This was before REST APIs were really a thing, everything was page driven ("SSR" in today's terms, I guess.) For anything dynamic, we'd use JQuery, make an ajax call, return partial HTML, and inject it into the page. It was actually incredibly productive. I later moved on to Laravel and ditched the home grown stuff for newer projects.
I don't do PHP work much these days (permanent "working from home" made me not want to do any extra work from home after hours), but it felt incredibly productive compared to the more modern tech I've seen in my day jobs. There's a lot of crap to wade through nowadays. A typical small project might have a React front end, Python back end, REST API's, documentation, cloud deployments, on-and-on. Web development isn't fun anymore.
Now I look back on PHP3/PHP4 with disgust. Globals, function names, massive pieces of code right in the middle of HTML, shell_exec.