It’s wild to me that people are still using PHP in 2026. It was known to be a god awful trainwreck of a language all the way back in like 2005 and it certainly hasn’t improved much since then. I guess that’s what happens when a language peaks right at the height of the dotcom bubble.
I’ve been a professional programmer for over 30 years with some of the biggest companies in the world. I’ve worked with assembly, c, c++, c#, java, kotlin, perl, lua, haskell, rust, javascript, typescript, coffeescrpit, dart, php, python, and I’m sure 3 or 4 other languages I’ve just forgotten about at this point. Some of those languages are terrible and I hope never to touch again, others were great and I’d be happy to work with.
PHP should have been retired as a language 20 yeara ago, but WordPress has kept it alive all this time. The rest of the industry has moved on and learned lessons from what came before, but the sheer momentum of hundreds of thousands of WordPress installs has somehow kept PHP alive. The language started as a hack, and it remains a hack. It’s gotten faster over the years, but it’s still just as badly designed today as it was when it was originally created.
As a security auditor, I would have specified that it’s the OLD php plugins/scripts extensibility that was the mess. And similar to CGI, PHP used to be a problem for infosec audits because it was usually so full of configuration holes that the mantra just became “Don’t use PHP”. AJAX implementations are also rife with security issues because of configuration errors. So is a default implementation of nginx.
But PHP gets the bad rep because it was hands down the most popular way to add custom functionality to a webapp during the time when infosec became a more widespread profession, a victim of its own success.
As an aside, a default install of PHP on reasonably modern Linux today is a hell of a lot more secure than it was in 2009. I know this because I did the comparison for a presentation to my peers in 2023.
This is the problem with extensible platforms that allow you the freedom to build what you want: their success is built on being malleable, which brings with it a lot of problems people with experience know to patch up, but less experienced people don’t.
It’s wild to me that people are still using PHP in 2026. It was known to be a god awful trainwreck of a language all the way back in like 2005 and it certainly hasn’t improved much since then. I guess that’s what happens when a language peaks right at the height of the dotcom bubble.
You have no idea what you’re talking about.
I’ve been a professional programmer for over 30 years with some of the biggest companies in the world. I’ve worked with assembly, c, c++, c#, java, kotlin, perl, lua, haskell, rust, javascript, typescript, coffeescrpit, dart, php, python, and I’m sure 3 or 4 other languages I’ve just forgotten about at this point. Some of those languages are terrible and I hope never to touch again, others were great and I’d be happy to work with.
PHP should have been retired as a language 20 yeara ago, but WordPress has kept it alive all this time. The rest of the industry has moved on and learned lessons from what came before, but the sheer momentum of hundreds of thousands of WordPress installs has somehow kept PHP alive. The language started as a hack, and it remains a hack. It’s gotten faster over the years, but it’s still just as badly designed today as it was when it was originally created.
As a security auditor, I would have specified that it’s the OLD php plugins/scripts extensibility that was the mess. And similar to CGI, PHP used to be a problem for infosec audits because it was usually so full of configuration holes that the mantra just became “Don’t use PHP”. AJAX implementations are also rife with security issues because of configuration errors. So is a default implementation of nginx.
But PHP gets the bad rep because it was hands down the most popular way to add custom functionality to a webapp during the time when infosec became a more widespread profession, a victim of its own success.
As an aside, a default install of PHP on reasonably modern Linux today is a hell of a lot more secure than it was in 2009. I know this because I did the comparison for a presentation to my peers in 2023.
This is the problem with extensible platforms that allow you the freedom to build what you want: their success is built on being malleable, which brings with it a lot of problems people with experience know to patch up, but less experienced people don’t.
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He’s right though. Didn’t know Lemmy was so pro PHP lol
You don’t have to be pro PHP to realize “PHP has not improved since 2005” is bullshit.
I used it quite a bit right at the beginning, when it was transitioning from being a “Pre-HTML Processor” templating utility to a proper language.
The syntax was nice and easy to pick up. The rest was pretty bad, a lot of security was left to the developer following best practices.
It improved with time, but it had already left a bad impression on me.
I know it’s still popular, as you can tell from the downvotes.
“It’s wild to me people are still using PHP”
You must be isolated from development if you think PHP is not still everywhere.
That’s not what he said.
That’s what she said?