Who are the people still using PHP?
The current state of PHP for 2023
I started my dev life as a PHP developer. Over the years, there’s been an emphasis on all things JavaScript. In part, it’s because frontend web runs on JavaScript in one way or another. It’s where I’ve lived in the past decade.
Recently, I’ve had some work relating to PHP. At first, I was surprised, in part, because of all the bad rep PHP gets — mostly due to its long standing association with outdated WordPress installations (and cue all the security vulnerabilities that comes with it). But that’s WordPress — not PHP specifically.
So I got curious. Who are the people actually using PHP? Why are they using it? and how does it compare to my little world of JavaScript server-side backends.
The Evolution of PHP and its current state in the world
PHP, which originally stood for “Personal Home Page” but now stands for “PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor,” was created in 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf. Initially, PHP was designed as a simple set of Perl scripts to maintain Lerdorf’s personal homepage. Over the years, it has evolved into a…
