I don’t know if it’s due to over-exposure to programming memes but I certainly believed that no one was starting new PHP projects in 2023 (or 2020, or 2018, or 2012…). I was under the impression we only still discussed it at all because WordPress is still around.
Would a PHP evangelist like to disabuse me of my notions and make an argument for using PHP for projects such as Kbin in this day and age?
Modern PHP is much better than most people expect. It has very little to do with the PHP4 we all grew up to dislike for its quirks and inconsistencies.
That said, I wish more software was done in PHP. And for me it makes a lot of sense regarding the Fediverse. A PHP platform I can put on my existing shared hosting and connect some (sub)domain to it and call it a day. Most smaller/meduim businesses probably have that hosting constellation already around, idling around most of the time. The entry barrier is just so much slower than spinning up a VPS or renting cloud space somewhere just to test a small instance of something. Sure it scales not as good as your average cloudplatform but for most usecases that is not the biggest concern.
Different product but I love Matomo as a Google Analytics because I can just copy the files to a clients shared hosting, connect a subdomain to it and if it uses Sqlite (also better than it’s fame!), I am done already and don’t need to create a database even.