PHP's evolution since PHP 5 has been substantial, and I think this is a real problem. As someone who learned the language years ago, the pace of change (generics, attributes, match expressions, typed properties) makes modern codebases genuinely difficult to follow.

I suspect this affects many developers who cut their teeth on PHP but haven't kept up. The language has become a different beast, which is a strength for the community but a barrier to re-entry.

▲

gramakri2 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

IMO, newer PHP is still very readable. I programmed with C++ for a decade, but I can safely say that I cannot understand a modern C++ code base anymore.

▲

johnisgood 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think PHP is way better now than it used to be. Learn PHP 8 and you are good to go.

▲

pjmlp 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is true for most languages though, compare C# 14 with C# 1.0, Java 25 with Java 1.0, C 23 (plus common compiler extensions) with K&R C,....

▲

deaddodo 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

C hasn’t changed all that much, and someone who coded in C99 would take about 30mins to catch up to a modern C23 codebase’s changes. Famously so, as conservatism to change is the main friction in the community for about two decades now.

If you pull out examples of the earliest C, sure, it looks weird. But that C was already obsolete in 1989. Since then, it’s had a minor iteration (e.g. five-eight additions/modifications) every decade-ish (99, 11, 17, 23). Has it changed? Sure. Can it be compared to the iteration and speed of things like C#, Java, C++, etc? No way.

▲

pjmlp an hour ago | parent [-]

I am quite sure many people would fail Pub Quizzes related to C, when taking into account the whole language alongside compiler extensions, regardless of the compiler.

	▲	deaddodo 22 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		To learn all of the common GCC and MSVC extensions would make up a fraction of the language features of C# or Java. You’re really overstating the complexity to make some invalid point. “Actually, one of the most notoriously conservative and simple (in feature set) languages is really super complex and has evolved a ton because it has _Generic and varargs now, and __packed__ exists as a compiler feature.” And to further double down, that minor evolution is over 36 years (arguably a decade longer, but I’m being generous with your argument). Not the 12-16 years (depending which 5 point release you wanna start with) that PHP has morphed into an entirely different language.

▲

ffsm8 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think he's thinking more along the lines of PHP 5-8.5

That version 1-latest is understandingly highly different, but these are all decades old languages, which barely changed for some time, but are now all introducing new syntax.

Which I think makes sense, but it's obviously going to leave 9-5 devs behind that don't particularly care for coding and want to invest as little time as possible into their language knowledge.

▲

rytis 2 hours ago | parent [-]

And what exactly 9-5 has to do with caring for coding or time investment in language learning?

	▲	monooso 2 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Not GP, but I assume the suggestion is that it's difficult to stay abreast of new developments within the constraints of a typical work day. Especially if your job utilises older technologies, as most do.

▲

ivolimmen 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Most likely this can be said about a lot of languages, most languages are being maintained and improved. I am an hired expert in Java and I needed to explain some new languages features to some colleagues that have been introduced recently, I only mention them if they actually improve readability though. I think PHP might be slightly different than other languages as a huge amount of people use this to create their first website as a hobby.

▲

phplovesong 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

PHP has no generics? I read somewhere that is was "too hard" to get right in PHP land, mostly because of how primitive the typesystem is.

▲

deaddodo 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It has nothing to do with being “too hard”, and everything to do with not making sense to the type system. PHP is weakly-typed and heavily reflection-based (so everything is aware of it’s and each other’s type at all times).

Adding generics to PHP would make CS fundamentalists somewhat happy, but do nothing to change the fundamental design of PHP nor offer any of the traditional benefits that generics offer to strongly-typed and compiled languages. And would be a massive headache to implement, while bulking an already heavy VM implementation.

	▲	phplovesong 42 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> And would be a massive headache to implement Exactly. The type system was never built for anything even slightly more complex. Its basically annotations for primitive types and classes. PHP has always had an weak type system, so adding generics will most likely never happen. > Adding generics to PHP would make CS fundamentalists somewhat happy PHP has really only one collection datatype (the infamous array), so having generics would be tremendously useful, as an example you cant return an typed array from a function, witch is just really bad. For an counter example, Python managed to do this, while also being a dynamic language, although having a stronger typing than PHP.

▲

dreadnip 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If you're interested about generics in PHP, you can read this blog post by the PHP foundation: https://thephp.foundation/blog/2024/08/19/state-of-generics-... or this PR by Nikita: https://github.com/PHPGenerics/php-generics-rfc/issues/45.

TLDR: The PHP compiler isn't really suited for the job, it would introduce a lot of complexity to an already complex codebase and the memory/performance hit would be substantial.

	▲	phplovesong 39 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Yup, this was pretty much what i recalled. The typesystem, while being incredibly "unintelligent", somehow still is so complex that generics are not going to happen.