PHP in 2019
As far as I&#x27;m concerned the bridges have burned a long time ago and I definitely can&#x27;t see myself giving PHP a second chance. That being said, if I&#x27;m wrong and PHP has really managed to become a decent language (or at least something that&#x27;s not completely insane) its defenders should focus on actually showing what modern PHP code looks like.<p>Is performance that much of a big deal for most people? In a world where Ruby on Rail exists I find that hard to believe. Server are cheaper and vastly more powerful now than in PHP&#x27;s infancy, I&#x27;m sure that for the vast majority of use cases PHP&#x27;s performance (whatever it is) is good enough.<p>The infamous &quot;Fractal of Bad Design&quot; wasn&#x27;t about that, it was about the ridiculously inconsistent and error-prone API, the insane defaults, the counter-intuitive behaviour of &#x27;==&#x27;, the headless chicken development roadmap where maintainers would add features because they were popular in other programing languages without trying to figure out if they had their place in PHP,...<p>Surely a lot of this has turned into technical debt? Even assuming that &quot;modern&quot; PHP managed to come up with better ways to deal with all of this, I assume that these obsolete functions and operators still linger for backward compatibility? If so how do you avoid them?<p>Again, I personally don&#x27;t really care, but if you want to win new converts who haven&#x27;t been as scarred by PHP as I have been I think that&#x27;s where you should focus your efforts. Maybe somebody should write a point-by-point rebuttal to the &quot;fractal of bad design&quot; article?