> but did they ever actually fix the WTFs from PHP 4?
If you have a background in C programming, most of the "wtf" is completely reasonable - the only thing "modern" and novice PHP programmers will still raise the WTF flag about is the standard library, mostly the string manipulation functions, their names and argument order. Old dogs know that this comes from early PHP being not much more than a thin wrapper around libc and various other C libraries.
Other than that, if you write modern PHP it's almost like Java, just without threads/concurrency in general, and without extremely braindead tooling required to get something built. PHP Composer is a breeze compared to Gradle, Maven and messing around with Tomcat, Glassfish and classpaths to get your application deployed...
PHP is extremely simple to use. That makes it extremely simple to onboard new people and also to support. Complexity brings associated costs, sometimes bigger than the development itself.
Last time I created a Laravel app it created dozens of default files and folders for me. How is that simpler than Go/Gin or Python/Fastapi? When does the extremely simple part come in?
You don't have to use Laravel. If you want more advanced stuff to be built in, go for it, but I can write reasonably complex apps with plain PHP. How simple is it? I showed a DBA with no programming experience (other than SQL) to make a change in an existing app in ~ 2 hours. The change was a new feature in the app, about ~ 100 loc. I also gave a complete non-technical colleague a small PHP application to own and support and it works quite fine 2 years later.
For one, PHP doesn't require bundlers to work, nor does it require compilers, transpilers, watchers or whatever. You just save your code in your editor of choice and that's it.
The proposition was PHP, Laravel, Inertia and React/Vue. Pretty sure Inertia is basically a transpiler to JS, and building the components in React will use a watcher for compilation. Not sure if it has TypeScript support.
Also, you still run artisan to view your code after you save. Same thing with Python's FastAPI: I run FastAPI's server. I just save my code just like PHP.
If you have a background in C programming, most of the "wtf" is completely reasonable - the only thing "modern" and novice PHP programmers will still raise the WTF flag about is the standard library, mostly the string manipulation functions, their names and argument order. Old dogs know that this comes from early PHP being not much more than a thin wrapper around libc and various other C libraries.
Other than that, if you write modern PHP it's almost like Java, just without threads/concurrency in general, and without extremely braindead tooling required to get something built. PHP Composer is a breeze compared to Gradle, Maven and messing around with Tomcat, Glassfish and classpaths to get your application deployed...