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What is PHP's Future with PHP 8?

How do you feel about PHP's future, especially with the introduction of PHP 8 and the continued growth of modern PHP frameworks?

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Top comments (8)

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ibtisam021 profile image
Ibtisam021

PHP continues to be the preferred choice for web developers, thanks to its straightforward structure and user-friendly nature. PHP's evolution with PHP 8 leads to an exciting new era for web development. The language continues to adapt to meet modern demands, strengthening its versatility and relevance.

Some important additions in PHP 8 include:

  • Just-in-Time (JIT) compilation supercharges performance, allowing PHP apps to run blisteringly fast. No more sluggishness.
  • Union Types enhance type safety for more reliable and maintainable code. Say goodbye to bugs.
  • Named Arguments and Constructor Property Promotion tidy up code by reducing verbosity. Clean and readable is the new norm.
  • Attributes enable more efficient metadata handling. No more tangled mess.

For developers and those aspiring to code, now is a good time to dive into PHP. The language is evolving to empower building robust, scalable applications. And to scale your PHP applications, a good managed PHP hosting is needed that will help you optimize your PHP application and also optimize it for a smooth run.

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villelmo profile image
William Torrez

Why the people say: PHP smell bad?

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ibtisam021 profile image
Ibtisam021

It's basically a term used when the code is poor or the design has flaws and one of these things can lead to a future problem. The incompetent programming errors are termed as a bad smell in PHP.

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ingosteinke profile image
Ingo Steinke, web developer • Edited

This question reminds me of an article that I contributed to in 2020, titled "PHP — the ugly duckling of web development".

PHP isn't going away any time soon, and PHP 8, like ECMAScript proves that it's possible to evolve a pragmatic scripting language into a modern programming language. I even claimed that the "PHP community is a vanguard of JavaScript's transformation."

I think that PHP and JavaScript have got a bad reputation not for what they are now, but for what they used to be. A lot of legacy web projects still have an ugly codebase, and pragmatic programming languages like PHP have made that possible. But PHP Standards Recommendations (PSR) have been very helpful to improve more recent code bases, and so have coding assistance tools like PhpStan.

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wordpressure profile image
TricaExMachina

I've never understood the shade that gets thrown at PHP, I love it and its what got me into coding properly. I use various JS frameworks as well for other projects but I enjoy PHP most.

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jlzaratec profile image
Luis Zárate

PHP necesita urgentemente unas excelentes campañas de marketing para volver a reposicionarlo en lo más alto y enterrar todo vestigio de código php mal escrito, sino seguirá siendo el patito feo del desarrollo web aún y con sus nuevas y excelentes características.

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prsaya profile image
Prasad Saya • Edited

Web application development is not simple because of various components associated with it - backend, frontend and things connecting them. I am new to PHP, but it does give a sense of simplicity and purposefulness to its approach to web development. I also see that PHP 8 has aspects of object orientation and functional programming.

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Ryan Brown

I've not dived into PHP in ages (mostly it was v3 when I was doing the most with it, and it fizzled out around v5 for me due to changes in career locations.)

I might have to pick it up again :D