Is PHP Dying in 2020?

Started in the year 1995, PHP is one of the popular server-side scripting languages designed for web development. Today, a big segment of the “server-side website development industry” is dominated by PHP. Besides, many popular sites like Wikipedia and Facebook as well as CMSs like WordPress, Magento, Drupal, and Joomla are built on PHP. Ok, PHP might not be the best or the most modern programming language. But that doesn’t mean it’s dead.

Reasons Why PHP has a long future:

1. PHP is synonymous to websites
2. Low development costs
3. Scalability
4. Security & Protection
5. Ginormous community
6. Easy to learn
7. Very rich, both on syntax features and constructs
8. Easy to find everywhere, on any hosting, with no additional costs
9. A huge amount of third-party libraries, packages, tutorials, books
10. Cheapest costs of all
11. Cheapest, easiest to find developers for your company
12. Even in the default configuration, more than adequate for all but the most demanding heavy usage. With additional effort, able to scale up to Facebook levels.

Reasons for PHP aliveness:

1. Easy to update: PHP based websites are easily updated and update prompt too. Since it is a server-side programming language, all its updates will be done from server side and not from the client side, thus secure. Besides, updates will not impact browser settings.
2. PHP libraries: PHP based websites are easily updated and update prompt too. Since it is a server-side programming language, all its updates will be done from server side and not from the client side, thus secure. Besides, updates will not impact browser settings.
3. Ample Documentation: A programming language, containing comprehensive documentation support, will certainly be every developer’s choice. There are numerous PHP documentations accessible online together with document generators. Popular content management platforms, for instance, WordPress take advantage of customized documentation scheme. Normally the documented elements are:
   • Classes and their properties.
   • Requires and includes.
   • File Headers.
   • Hooks (actions and filters).
   • Functions and class methods.
   • Inline comments

What is the future of PHP?

PHP powers the huge majority of the websites in the world. By far. This is thanks to some “giant” applications like WordPress or very large “users” (Facebook and many others).

When not used as the async, event-driven model, base PHP faces upper limits on the number of concurrent website hits that are below Node.js, Go and Scala. Not using PHP as the async, event-driven model allows to quickly and easily create complex applications that are still more than fast enough to be used by large enterprises. When used with an async model, its speed grows. PHP 7.2 is about 5% faster than PHP 7.0

Since achieving enterprise-grade, ultra-massive throughput (a la YouTube-Netflix-Amazon scale) involves a whole re-thinking of data centers, servers, services stacks and so on, the embedded costs of using async PHP or another solution become just “one of many balance voices” in the whole project.

With PHP, version 7.1 coming in hot, it looks like a completely new language with new and improved features. It will further evolve and come out stronger and better than ever before. One of the most significant qualities of PHP is that it is open source. This allows for a full code visibility and a large community of developers resulting in new ideas, quicker development, and troubleshooting.