[ PHP ]
Why PHP is still the pragmatic choice for a business that needs to ship
PHP is unglamorous, everywhere, and frequently the correct answer. Here is the business case rather than the benchmark.
PHP runs quietly underneath a very large share of the web — WordPress and Magento alone put it on a substantial fraction of every commercial site there is. That ubiquity is usually argued about as a matter of taste. It is more useful to argue about it as a matter of cost, speed and risk.
The case
It fits any size of business and most industries, which means the same team and the same patterns carry from a brochure site to a platform.
It is open source, so there is no licence between an idea and a running version of it.
Its libraries and frameworks are mature enough that most of what a project needs already exists, which is what actually decides how fast something ships.
It scales, and the path from a single server to a load-balanced fleet is well trodden rather than experimental.
And it has a community large enough that almost any problem you hit has been hit before, in public, with an answer attached.
What separates a good PHP project from a bad one
Not the language. The practices around it.
Security taken seriously from the first commit rather than added after an audit. Performance measured rather than assumed. Code kept modular and documented, so the second year of a project costs less than the first rather than more. Tests, so a change is a change and not a gamble. And automation — build, test and deploy — so that shipping is boring.
Every one of those is a choice a team makes, and each of them is why two projects in the same language end up in completely different places.
Originally published
This first appeared on LinkedIn in March 2024: linkedin.com/in/amar-beka-2771ab1b3