When I studied computer science, I promised myself to never touch PHP again.
But PHP has more to give than just as a birthing ground for teenage programmers.
When I many years later accepted a PHP job as a senior developer, PHP provided a consistent experience of "bad practice everywhere", a fractal of cringe I couldn't ironically reproduce. Working with this for a year taught me a lot about how to deal with critical legacy software beyond repair and being responsible with what you've got.
I think there is no better way to get your hands consistently dirty than with PHP.
Coincidence: I do embedded Rust, and my wife is a buddhist monk. ;-)
Many of my programming jobs in PHP had me working with people that were super anal about "good coding practices". Especially the Symfony guys seem to try to be the new ultra-corporate Java. So I don't think it a issue with the language but more that you didn't find your people. (Personally, I actual like working with legacy crap. It's easy money and reminds me of the past when things were simpler.)
I feel most of the PHP community is pretty mature these days. More pragmatic than Rust, sure but that is a good point in my book. Though I am glad you found your enlightenment.
Symfony was the worst. Holy shit dude.
I still have to deal with a legacy Symfony project, which needs to be rewritten because of their... I don't even know what to call it.
That stof guy was one of the worst.
Inconsistencies, incompatibility. But the dogma was strong.
Indeed they wanted to be the Java of PHP.
And so inefficient. Imagine duplicating all variables of a request context for dogmas sake. So you can later do Request->getVar() from their own copy.
It shows a basic not understanding of the language.
> I don't think it a issue with the language but more that you didn't find your people
I can be more specific: I'm identifying problems with the language ecosystem.
I deliberately didn't shit on the people involved; I'll definitely ride the #not-all-php-programmers (I've met some great ones), but it takes a broken mind to accept a toolchain this historically fallible as something with which you'd want to recreate the Java ecosystem. ;-)
"bad practise everywhere" - you could say that for C++, Python and many more programming languages, too. If we're honest - most of the code out there is poorly written. PHP - nowadays - doesn't prevent developers in following good practises.
But PHP has more to give than just as a birthing ground for teenage programmers.
When I many years later accepted a PHP job as a senior developer, PHP provided a consistent experience of "bad practice everywhere", a fractal of cringe I couldn't ironically reproduce. Working with this for a year taught me a lot about how to deal with critical legacy software beyond repair and being responsible with what you've got.
I think there is no better way to get your hands consistently dirty than with PHP.
Coincidence: I do embedded Rust, and my wife is a buddhist monk. ;-)