Is PHP the new JavaScript?

I didn't really touch PHP (other than some WP themes or plugins here and there, don't sue me) until 2 years ago when I started building apps in Laravel.

PHP is a much different language than it was 10-15 years ago.

But why is everyone talking about it now? We read an article from Mux/Dave Kiss where we get a front row seat as Dave tries Laravel for the first time.

Let's learn together.

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Keep creating.

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[kencalvins]

I look forward to seeing countries in Africa having strong Laravel communities. PHP gets beautiful by day! More support from Kenya Josh!

[TheHronar]

It's not just Laravel. PHP has been consistently getting better and better. With every update they've been adding more and more features that developers expect from modern programming languages and frankly, the synchronous nature of PHP and the way it is executed makes it exceptionally good for rapid development for small to medium business and frankly, even at the larger companies I've worked at PHP still worked for 90% of cases. Those 10% where it didn't, we just slot in some Go and forget about it.

[rallisf]

JS is all about component abstraction, multiple backends, microservices, serverless, and all this crap 99.9% of web sites/apps do not need. Laravel is a good old PHP monolith that can you can sugar coat with a JS front-end if you want to. It is so good a concept that all JS frameworks had to copy it (Next/Nuxt/SvelteKit) and even promote SSR.

P.S. Yes, you can do modern stuff with Laravel/PHP like deploy to serverless and/or microservices, but nobody cares.
P.S.2. I mostly use SvelteKit.

[nasko]

Man I remember day 1 when I first initialized a laravel project.. I thought it would be impossible for me to learn. And now it all feels so intuitive and easy. To anyone looking to give it a shot I'd say - give it at least a solid 2 weeks and once it clicks you will never want to go back!

[pratikbhujel]

The fact that I started to learn Laravel around the same time as you did and yet you are way way ahead of me tells something, something I am doing wrong.
Thanks for the content.

[DEBUGENTITY]

PHP & laravel are awesome. Why people hates them i didn't understand.. They offer everything in one package. Still peoples hates it. I think they r just jealous of PHP. 😂

[razeft]

When I learned to program it was the era of Javascript, everywhere on the web it was recommended to learn it because everything was done with JS, so I did and when I tried PHP I didn't find it good, then after a few years they advised me to try PHP and I went on Laracasts, I love PHP now and not only do I find it good as a language but also using Laracast I find it as an excellent framework to work with.

[techrevolution]

Laravel is a great framework with lots of built-in features, but it abstracts a lot of the underlying logic. This means developers might miss out on understanding what’s happening under the hood. Also, these heavy abstractions come with a performance cost. While PHP itself is quite fast, Laravel’s abstractions can slow down the startup of even simple applications. Laravel works well for complex applications with low to moderate traffic, but for high-traffic sites, while it can scale, it often results in higher costs on platforms like AWS.

[Voidstroyer]

The title of the blog post is a bit misleading to be honest. The post is mainly about laravel, and not really php. I don't like php, but laravel is awesome. PHP has indeed improved massively over the years (my first encounter with php was back in 2011/2012, can't really remember), and then I first used it in production in 2014 in my first job modifying some wordpress themes. Then I first used Laravel in production in 2021 (we used Laravel version 8). I am definitely in favor of fullstack frameworks that are oppinionated. It makes it easy to join projects that are already in progress. Laravel definitely makes that easy. Javascript frameworks tend to have too much flexibility where if you join a new Javascript project you really don't know what you are getting yourself into. The flexibility is a massive, very sharp, double-edged sword.

[abrahamibrahimovic]

Even though I like Laravel. I still prefer Symfony. More structured, better ORM, superior forms system, better ORM, Turbo Integration, and last but not least the API-Platform and the better docs.

For big and professional projects, I would always prefer Symfony over Laravel.

If you just know Symfony from 10 or 15 years ago, you should give it a try, because that is what professional PHP devs use nowadays

[mel-]

I'm loving Laravel since I started version 7, things just got easier and more fun.

[ningld-gi]

Laravel saved my hope for web development, can’t imagine going back to fullstack js

[jamesgphillips]

So... i started with js and worked as a react dev. I took a side project in Larvel Vue monorepo. The funny thing about this, is the strongest thing about Laravel is the strength of Rails. You get amazing cli commands that just generate your code. With that said, these technologies are for monoliths and do not mee the same use cases serverless javascript apps. Most companies only need a monolith, but its not what big orgs are doing and VC is going to continue funding companies that rely on cloud credits to scale massives serverless apps. IMPO loco, a rust framework emulating rails, is a better choice.

[ChrisVisserDev]

Switched back in the days from PHP with Laravel 4 to MeteorJS. It took a long time for JS to catch up the serverside of what meteor had for a long time, but with NuxtJS that has shifted again.

PHP was grwat, but it lacked the ability of being able to run everywhere and required external scripts for running as background process. JS was just more versatile and that pushed me into JS. Now that JS is maturing, there really is no reason to use another language for the server

[druganov]

I use react as my front end and laravel as the backend and inertia for the glue with SSR, and I don’t want anything else☺️

[bartech]

PHP was always good for the time. And as said it was so easy to use almost anyone could do something in it. So blaming bad code on PHP was unfair.

[JavierArcheni]

One interesting thing about the article is that Dave relies on AI to create his examples. OK, that could be valid for other technologies, but it adds a lot of extra points to the Laravel's developer-friendly ecosystem (documentation, packages, community...)

[Coding_Junkie]

The syntax makes a little more sense to me. Plus, why can’t JS do date functions as simple as PHP 😆

[genechristiansomoza]

I do not have issues using php. It is easy to use.

[banwa_non]

With the amount of tooling, seems like it.