Oh please don't get so flamewar-y. Admittedly PHP does require some more discipline than most languages and it doesn't look the most elegant, but there are certainly plenty of reasons to use it.
I'll give the example of an internal system I develop for an IT company. Technically, it could be written in whatever, but they explicitly wanted PHP, as do a great many businesses. Why? Because PHP is after plain HTML the absolute simplest to make a server for and if you want to host it externally, it's still simple and really cheap.
There is plenty of demand for PHP for other reasons, and these days, most of these codebases won't even be horrible spaghetti
I learned Spring, one of the worst frameworks I ever worked with (note that I have worked with Laravel too). Spring is a bloated mess with lots of legacy & misuse of annotations, a.k.a necromancy.
It has somewhat improved with Spring Boot, but still to be avoided.
Database layer in Spring, especially if you combine it with the monstrosity called Hibernate, is enough to apply to an insane asylum. Trying to debug what combinations of annotations that work and doesn't work is time you could have used writing PHP instead and get results.
The idea that you can annotate a SQL schema & query language into a Java class with annotations is one of the most asinine ideas I ever come across.
What language _isn't_ trying to be Java these days? What the old jargon file described as "bondage and discipline lanugage" applies to all major programming environments now, as Java proved that you can actually commodify programmers quite well and both old-school enterprises and the SV juggernaut need their harvest.
C#, TypeScript, Go, PHP -- they all converge on the same methods, tools and workflows. Tech choice these days is about what you want to have on your resume.
> You can actually commodify programmers quite well and both old-school enterprises and the SV juggernaut need their harvest.
At first we had guilds and craftsmen. We could only produce a few things, their quality was quite low and the products were expensive. This was one of the reasons quality of life was quite bad, actually.
Then we created the assembly line, standardized parts, mass production. Life sucked for the assembly line worker, but everyone else benefited. From a certain point of view even the assembly line worker benefited.
Hand crafting doesn't scale. 1 brilliant coder with in the Lisp Ivory Tower won't ever be able to reproduced the output of 100 decent covers in the Java Middleware Shop. It stands to reason, those decent coders can use their brains and time to test more, implement more kinds of features, talk to customers, colleagues, bosses, maybe even promote their product and do all sorts of things human beings do when they want something (coding is only a minor part of creating a successful product).
Two heads are better than one. And 100 heads that are not at loggerheads are better than two.
That's a whole bunch of items in one place. I don't disagree, to get better cooperation and efficiency in a group, languages and tooling have to adapt. That's part of my point, if what you're doing is the same, the languages will look the same.
But I quite disagree with the "it made our lives better" point, and would say that the efficiency, even with all the standardized language outlook, tooling and methodology is closer to the "9 women getting a baby in 1 month" quip than to Ford's assembly lines.
This is a bit too late, but for future reader's reference: I meant "mass produced software", regarding its benefits. I highly doubt that Facebook's ad network is comparable with mass produced pharmaceuticals or refridgeration. Mass produced mustard gas maybe.
Spring Boot and https://micronaut.io/ gets my job done. Thank you. Yes, I build web apps with Java so I don't have to waste my time with php. Life's too short. And I am old enough to remember the abomination Joomla was back in early 2000's and how horrible php was back then when my clients wanted to have their "sites" done in Joomla with custom plugins.
Spring Boot code is probably going to be less maintainable than PHP though. Added a new dependency? Congratulations, now your application behaves completely differently.
It scans the classpath and silently instantiates whatever it finds. E.g. you're depending on the mongodb client drivers? Congratulations, your spring context suddenly contains connections to mongodb servers. Upgrade one of your dependencies and the new version has a dependency on tomcat? Congratulations, your spring boot application silently starts running a webserver.
