What the arrival of PHP 7 means to me.

Like many beginners, I started my journey into web development and server side scripting with PHP during my freshman year. More specifically, PHP 5.x.

n00b Times

It was extremely easy for me to pick it up. Since I knew a bit of C++, the syntax was pretty easy. I just had to remember a few things. No types for the variables I declare and prefix all the variables with ‘$’. Great.

No callback hell. Everything was executed in order. No huge scaffolded project. I knew what each one of my files did.

I could also alternate between HTML and PHP. Wow.

Improving as a Developer

Then as I progressed, I learned about M-V-C architectural pattern and started separating the data from the views.

“ JSON ftw! ”

As I explored more and more, I saw a lot of people criticizing PHP. Many told me that it is slow.

“ Development is a pain. NodeJS is the only real dev language. ”

What I think about PHP and PHP 7

I’ve always felt at home with PHP. I’m currently using Laravel as it makes things easier for a lot of reasons. I use PHP when I need to get something up and running fast. I use it even when I want to write code that I think is art.

I think PHP is like water. It takes whatever form that you need it to take. Want to create a website in 10 minutes? PHP will let you do that. Want to make a beautifully designed framework that you can call art? PHP will let you do that.

One minor complaint was with speed. Facebook resolved that with HHVM. Now PHP 7 resolves a lot of those issues. It is almost twice as fast as the previous release! The benchmarks can be viewed here.

PHP 7 includes the spaceship operator, deprecates some functions (which IMHO needed to be deprecated) and features scalar type hints.

Conclusion

PHP still powers a lot of webpages. It has a very nice developer community. I still love PHP. I’m looking forward to PHP 7.