The only issues I have. is that this is a 'double edged sword' in that PHP has become far more complex since the launch of PHP 5 and so it isn't as easy to understand from scratch as it used to be

I suspect this affects many developers who cut their teeth on PHP but haven't kept up. The language has become a different beast, which is a strength for the community but a barrier to re-entry.

My favourite PHP product at the moment is BookStack (https://www.bookstackapp.com/), a really good wiki. I run an instance for my family and it's great.

But there are loads of things. And I notice that many of the sites I like using...are built on well maintained PHP stacks.

    Backticks as an alias for shell_exec() are deprecated

like in `mkdir $dirname`;

The url parse example is not being compared to the builtin parse_url function that is just as easy to use.

- URI extension: there was already the internal `parse_url()` which was imperfect, and alternative libraries that were RFC 3986 compliant. An official extension will bring speed, but now there will be 2 official ways to parse URLs.

- The pipe operator is a matter of taste. In the release notes, the new code is more verbose, because it defines anonymous functions. This alternative syntax means keeping a consistent code style will be harder.

- The update of "clone" replaces 2 lines of code in some cases. Unless I misunderstood, it's a very minor change.

- The #Discard/void will replace the similar feature from static analyzers.

- Closures in constants is one of the 2 features that bring more than an alternative syntax. It's one more little step toward a preprocessor. But I'm not thrilled about the future #attributes assigned with complex closures.

- cURL persistent handles are a real performance feature, because curl_init() is costly.

- array_first() is a minor syntax-sugar. In a project of 100k+ lines of PHP, I probably could use it twice or thrice. Was it worth a global function?

Its still so annoying that you have to use mb_real_uppercase($name) for unicode. The other gripe is that the stdlib is SO messy. With PHP 5.3 they had a once in a lifetime opportunity to cleanup the stdlib and introduce a new namespaced API for builtins, and optionally introduce a uniform function call syntax:

    "foo"->strtoupper();

PHP has come a long way from the PHP 4.0 era, but is still lacking in multiple areas, and i dont see it being a pick for greenfield projects in 2025.

    $output = $input
        |> trim(...)
        |> (fn (string $string) => str_replace(' ', '-', $string))
        |> (fn (string $string) => str_replace(['.', '/', '…'], '', $string))
        |> strtolower(...);

    $output = $input
        |> trim($)
        |> str_replace(' ', '-', $)
        |> str_replace(['.', '/', '…'], '', $)
        |> strtolower($);

PHP like Ruby had some big companies built on it - Facebook: PHP, Ruby: Github/Shopify

PHP was able to swallow Hack and become PHP8 - they optimized for getting beginners into the language / ecosystem

Ruby while a beautiful / friendly language and ecosystem - got into political wars - didn't optimize for beginners on windows etc

even as a person who favors Rails - Laravel is ahead -> on documentation & bringing various ways to do things into the framework. There's no stick with Hotwire. You wanna do livewire go ahead, we will help you. You wanna do Inertia + JS - go ahead we will help you.

I remember when escaping SQL input data was "the correct way" to use your mysql database. Parametrization? Nah, just use mysql_escape_string or whatever it was called.

Probably because compile/interpret is one way street. There is no way to lets say view/transform a part of the code in functional or imperative depending on what you need to do with it.

Reading modern php or even worse mixed generations code base feels like another full time job on top of the regular one - coding with it.

And a new language could have been developed , call it hack or whatever Facebook tried. Anyway I remember php coding gave me headaches. Tried it again 2 years ago and found out the same kind of issues(outdated /inexistent documentation, different ways to do the same thing that actually didn’t work and stuff like that). Try to connect to sql database using ssl and see what I mean.

I see no reason to learn PHP anymore or start up your company using php. We live in a vps/docker age. The advantage of php hosts everywhere has been lost.