New comment by smt88 in "Java will kill your startup. PHP will save it"

I spent about 10 years in a niche: maintaining legacy PHP software. I have been down some very deep rabbitholes of PHP black magic. I have written 10+ medium-to-large applications from scratch in PHP, 4 of which are still running in production more than 8 years later.

I feel qualified to say the following:

- Java will not kill your startup. Bad coding MIGHT. But it also might not.

- PHP will not save your startup. Good coding MIGHT. But it also might not.

- You can write good/bad software in Java. I've seen both.

- You can write bad software in PHP. I've never seen good software in PHP (including my own). At this point, it's becoming hard to believe it is possible to write good software in PHP.

Mostly this is a problem with the awful design of the language. Adding better typing is helping, but at that point, why not just use something else?

Also, most arguments in favor of PHP mention its popularity. I suspect that if you removed WordPress, Drupal, etc. from the calculation, you'd see PHP plummet to the bottom. I don't know any young people who learn it anymore, and I haven't met a startup building their product in PHP in many years.

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