Recently, I listened to Lex Friedman's [podcast with Pieter Levels](https://open.spotify.com/episode/6KBpL2XfR9VdojbKNpE7cX). Pieter talked about his technology stack for building startups: vanilla PHP, jQuery, and SQLite.

Hype is exciting, but there is no better technology proof than long-term usage by sustainable business.

The podcast inspired me to write my views about why PHP is the best choice for long-term.

Tomas Votruba

PHP is highlighted as the best choice for long-term business stability due to its mature ecosystem, time-tested frameworks like Symfony and Laravel, and advanced tools like PHPStan and Rector. The post contrasts PHP's longevity and stability with the rapidly changing JavaScript framework landscape, emphasizing the cost efficiency and reliability that PHP provides for businesses over time.

PHP is the Best Choice for Long‑Term Business

PHP has Long-term Stability you can Rely on

The best choice is whatever programming language you are most productive in.
Don’t learn technologies, but instead learn programming principles.

This is not a competition. I would say people who knows the language and use it often would have a better opinion. But overall this hating game is super annoying. Code with what you are comfortable with and like. Stop hating on something you have no clue about. I code in PHP and am loving it. I don’t care if your JS is better or whatever other language you code with or prefer. We are all developers are we not? We solve issues with code and having this hating war is pointless. Use that energy on something useful like saving the planet.

A very important feature of PHP: No memory leaks. PHP4Ever!

All this arguing, when everyone knows a full JS stack is superior.

I worked for a company that suffered because its main products were written in PHP, which became almost impossible to support and extend.
<ol>
<li>PHP type system is a total failure, regardless of type annotations. Other dynamic typing languages suffer from the same issue.</li>
<li>Because of a dynamic, weak typing system, the code doesn’t scale. I mean, in terms of growing the codebase, it is almost impossible to support it after it reaches some state regardless amount of e2e, unit and integration tests.</li>
<li>Whenever I needed to debug something in PHP, 99% of my thoughts were “WTF??” because of the typing system and unobvious inconsistencies.</li>
<li>Literally 95% of bugs were caused by PHP typing system.</li>
<li>PHP is very slow if you have a big codebase (I worked on a project with around ~2 million LOC). It takes a lot of resources just to load the code for each request, and it also has additional inlined HTML. People who built those projects were minifying PHP for prod like we usually do for JS.</li>
<li>One of the worst issues is that PHP majorly breaks between versions. The project I was working on was stuck forever with 7.2. It took several years to migrate it to 7.0. In higher-level management, it was decided that it is easier to rewrite the product in a normal programming language in 10 years than try to migrate to a newer PHP version. Go is younger, but any code in go always builds with the newest compiler.</li>
<li>Concurrency is still unusable in PHP, unfortunately.</li>
<li>I have a php-ptsd, so my opinion might be very subjective. But I would never recommend using PHP in a big scale projects.</li>
</ol>