Comment by L on "Will PHP last another 20 years?"

Not in a form we know PHP today. If large companies (like Facebook) uses it (HHVM) it will be forked and made better. It really just needs a talented team who can make it better but it won't be called PHP anymore. JavaScript is a trend but I don't think that will last either because the community gets more and more diverse, frameworks are released almost daily.

New languages. This is the key. Something new will come as always. In the beginning when PHP started, tech was evolving slowly. So it lasted a lot because it was the perfect time to start a programming language but nowadays it is way harder to keep up with the trending stuff. New languages like Go focus on making the language itself modern and the community good and exclusive.

I have a tip that the Apple-backed Swift will last longer than the languages we know today but that is just a personal tip.

Also if you look at the startup scene today, you won't really see startups written with PHP. If someone writes a codebase in PHP, he is considered oldschool in Silicon Valley and lame. And this generation will form the next 20 years if you think about it.

Conclusion: It will be around but mostly as a fork, not the base language

I personally see the majority of higher-level languages becoming more and more similar - Swift is a big departure from the Objective-C style towards the Java style.

They are all encroaching on each others feature sets. While there will always probably be differences of opinion (and no small amount of stubbornness) towards different syntaxes and writing styles, these 'arguments' are largely obsolete when compared to the main metrics of low barrier to entry, ease of use, ease of debugging and language performance. Tooling and community come into play too, but not so much.

Of course, it's hard to imagine right now a single language that would cater for all needs, such a monolith being the very antithesis of current development patterns. Javascript seems best dressed for it though right now. And despite it's obvious differences, I've always maintained that there is considerable similarity between PHP and Javascript and this may be one reason why so many PHP developers are moving to the likes of Node.

I believe PHP as it is today will disappear. The PHP of 20 years from now (whatever that might be) won't resemble anything of what we know today. As the machines we're using fundamentally change in the wake of new approaches to computing, the underlying fabric of the web - from the network protocols to the interchange formats and a whole slew of other items in between - will of necessity change. And languages like PHP will have to change with them or die.

Could we even see a higher-level approach to programming altogether where microservices take the place of functions and frameworks? Then larger, more powerful building blocks are more easily connected by 'developers' who don't actually write code?

Search Hashnode