Today's PHP is better than it has ever been. Are there some things that are rough around the edges? yes ofc. But there is no language that doesn't have that. It's all trade-offs.

Last week I switched from Nginx+FPM to FrankenPHP and my god even the deployment experience got 10x better.

Safe to say that if you haven't tried the language, give it a shot. Within a few days you'll know if it's a good fit for you or not!

According to this data (the same data referenced by WordPress marketing blog posts[1], if it's legit enough for them it's legit enough for me) WordPress usage across the web stopped growing almost all at once in 2021, with the beginning of a decline this year.

You can see an increase of other contenders (Shopify, for example) but of note is also None, which is probably related to how LLMs have been making it incredibly easy to deliver a website even without a CMS.

1: https://wordpress.com/blog/2025/04/17/wordpress-market-share...

IMO the article failed articulating what is PHP's unique selling point.

Oh the smell! It's so obvious.

I wonder why though, why does every single AI write like this? There are barely any variance and everything looks exactly the same. Youtube, blogs, linkedin, it is so obvious that everyone is using the same thing, is this even model specific?

I've never been a fan of AI polishing my writings, but now I wouldn't even get it grammar checked. All of my writing that I expect people to read, particularly philosophy and rationale, are one shot stuff that came out of keyboard like this one.

But it’s still never going to be a language I like, and I’m yet to encounter any of these modern codebases in the wild. It’s invariably a crusty old relic, much closer to the PHP of 2006 than the PHP of 2026.

Can you not ship fast with a much faster language right now using LLMs?

https://stitcher.io/blog/php-in-2019

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19917655

And while sentiment is understandably mixed even then, I actually think a lot of people have already come around on PHP as being "not as bad as it once was", if not even "good".

Some of its reputation, though, hinges not on out-of-date internet commentary, but instead on the fact that in practice a lot of the PHP code that's still in production today is simply legacy code and not up to modern standards, and most of the time when someone says PHP, they really mean that PHP. I think that is actually the thing that is holding PHP back hard outside of bubbles like HN. And honestly, even though I don't hate modern PHP, I don't have many codebases that come to mind when I think about modern PHP that are exemplary. I actually was relatively impressed with the s9e TextFormatter library used by phpBB3 when I looked at it, but even that is dated by today's standards.

Still, I think that PHP has an undeservedly bad reputation relative to other languages. I've recently come back into Python lately after having not really touched a ton of Python in a while and I gotta say, other than `uv` and `ty`, I don't feel a whole lot has improved in Python land. It's not that greenlets and gevent were fantastic or anything, but I thought it was satisfactory enough. Now that there's also asyncio, it feels like a nightmare trying to untangle old code and bring it into the async future... So many things just don't really work in this world, like old-school lazy fetching in SQLAlchemy. Python was most famous for the horrible Python 3000 migration, but so many years later and I'm not sure how much was really learned as reconciling greenlet and asyncio worlds feels like yet another Sisyphean task of trying to rebuild everything at once. OK, it isn't as bad, especially since you can at least wrap sync code into thread pools, but it definitely is an absolute PITA, and I feel like what we're getting out of it doesn't exceed what we're putting in.

So that's my thoughts. Internet commentary is probably no longer PHP's biggest enemy; instead, it's more like its own past successes. (And, also, the fact that we easily forgive the tools we use regularly for the faults that we have been used to for years.)