I these kinds of jokes are kind of embarrassing and I’ve only heard from novices or developers who haven’t touched PHP in decades. Note I don’t write PHP at all these days since it’s not the best tool to solve the problems I work on.
Modern PHP is rather excellent. Laravel is lovely, Composer is solid. Language has pretty much everything one could want for, even optional strict typing.
PHP is laughed at because it traditionally was one of the first languages novices sunk their teeth into, especially as the whole web2.0 thing captured everyone’s attention.
Even the best tool can be wielded poorly by a fool. I’ve seen some absolutely shocking Rust by Bevy users and don’t get me started on enterprise Java applications.
When I hear a developer shit on PHP, all I hear is a shit developer. (Unless they’re making a truly reasonable justification such as strict modes lack of warning as ints are cast to floats or whatever)
I used to like Laravel, but I started using it well before PHP 7.0 so I developed a large webapp using shitty practices, abuse of strings, and other unmaintainable shenanigans and I'm still dealing with the consequences.
I realize that's mainly on me, and I'm not real familiar with PHP's newer features since I started doing more .net projects, but I don't want to go back to anything that doesn't have a compiler.
Edit: I just remembered the thing that pissed me off most about Laravel: Trying to upgrade major versions was awful. "We renamed this function for no real reason." "We switched the order of the parameters in that function because fuck you." "We removed support for this package which is was a dependency for some of your other Composer packages. Have fun in dependency hell."
