PHP: The Cockroach of Programming Languages (And Why That's a Compliment)

Unkillable, unfashionable, undeniably employed

In 2011, an article titled “PHP is Dying” made its rounds. The author predicted that within five years, PHP would be relegated to legacy maintenance. That was 15 years ago. PHP still powers 73.3% of websites with detectable server-side technology (W3Techs, January 2026).

I’ve been writing PHP since 2002. For 15 of those years, it’s been my primary income as a freelancer. I’ve worked with Symfony since version 2. And every few years, someone confidently tells me my career choice is dying.

They’re still wrong. But they’re not entirely without points.

The Critics Have Some Points

Let’s be honest: PHP has real problems. Acknowledging them makes us better developers, not disloyal ones.

The stdlib is chaos. Parameter order is inconsistent (strpos($haystack, $needle) vs array_search($needle, $haystack)). Naming conventions are all over the place (str_replace vs substr vs string_starts_with). This isn’t defensible. It’s historical baggage from rapid, community-driven growth in the early years.

Unicode handling is bolted on. You need mb_* functions for proper multibyte support, and forgetting to use them causes subtle bugs. In 2026, this still isn’t first-class.

Legacy code gives PHP a bad name. A lot of PHP in the wild is genuinely awful. Unmaintained WordPress plugins, spaghetti from 2008, raw SQL everywhere. When critics say “PHP code is bad,” they’re often looking at code that would be bad in any language, but PHP’s low barrier to entry means there’s more of it visible.

These are legitimate criticisms. If someone focuses on these points, they’re being fair.

Why the Myth Persists

So if PHP has real problems, why do I call “PHP is dying” a myth? Because the predictions don’t track reality. The “PHP is dying” narrative has been continuous since at least 2004 (Slashdot discussions) through 2007 (early blog posts) to 2011 (mainstream tech press) to today.

Survivor bias works both ways. Critics remember the terrible PHP 4 code they encountered. They don’t see the modern Symfony applications with strict typing, 100% test coverage, and clean architecture. Those applications just work quietly in production.

The hype cycle favors new things. Node.js was “killing PHP” in 2012. Go was killing it in 2015. Rust in 2018. Each new language gets breathless coverage. PHP keeps shipping features and growing its ecosystem without the same fanfare.

Engagement farming. “PHP is dead” generates clicks and heated discussions. “PHP 8.4 adds property hooks” doesn’t trend on X (which replaced Twitter).

The Myths That Won’t Die

Let me address the specific claims I keep hearing:

“PHP is slow.” PHP 7 (2015) was roughly 2x faster than PHP 5.6. PHP 8.0 (2020) added JIT compilation, though for typical web apps, OPcache matters more than JIT. Modern PHP with OPcache is not your bottleneck. Your database queries are. It’s in the same performance tier as Ruby and Python, and while Node.js is faster for I/O-heavy tasks, PHP’s simplicity and deployment model often matter more.

“PHP can’t scale.” Wikipedia handles billions of monthly requests with PHP. Etsy runs on PHP. Meta and Slack handle billions of requests on Hack, a language derived from PHP running on HHVM. Of course, scaling requires architecture: caching layers, load balancers, async workers. But that’s true for any language. PHP doesn’t prevent you from scaling; it just doesn’t do it for you.

“PHP is insecure.” PHP had security issues in the early 2000s. So did every other language. Modern PHP frameworks have CSRF protection, prepared statements, and XSS filtering built-in. The OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities are language-agnostic problems that PHP tooling actively helps prevent.

“PHP means spaghetti code.” PHP doesn’t prevent good architecture. It just doesn’t require it. You can write spaghetti in any language. The difference is that PHP’s low barrier to entry means more beginners publish code. That’s a community issue, not a language issue.

The Ecosystem Matured

The PHP ecosystem of 2026 is unrecognizable from 2010.

Composer changed everything. Before 2012, PHP dependency management meant browsing phpclasses.org, downloading zip files, and gluing code together with manual include paths. Deployment meant FTP-uploading your files and running chmod 777 configure.php. Anyone who installed osCommerce knows the ritual: upload via FTP, set world-writable permissions, run the web installer, then delete the install/ directory before someone hijacked your store. Now we have Packagist with over 380,000 packages (as of early 2026), semantic versioning, and deterministic builds.

Package quality matters. The npm ecosystem has more packages, but also had left-pad (2016): an 11-line package that broke thousands of builds when its author unpublished it. Composer’s design and PHP’s culture favor fewer, more substantial packages. A typical PHP project has dozens of dependencies; a typical Node project has thousands.

PSR standards unified the ecosystem. PSR-4 (autoloading), PSR-7 (HTTP request/response interfaces), PSR-11 (dependency injection containers). Frameworks that were incompatible in 2010 now share components. You can use a Laravel package in Symfony. This wasn’t possible fifteen years ago.

Static analysis is mainstream. PHPStan and Psalm (think: TypeScript-style type checking, but for PHP) catch bugs before runtime. Level 9 strictness approaches TypeScript’s guarantees. Type declarations that were optional in PHP 7 are now enforced by tooling in most professional codebases.

“Boring” is a feature. PHP’s deployment model hasn’t changed: upload files, configure web server, done. No runtime to manage, no process supervision required (for traditional deployments), no package-lock conflicts in production. Predictable is valuable.

PHP in 2026

Modern PHP is genuinely enjoyable to write. Property hooks in PHP 8.4 bring computed properties without boilerplate. Asymmetric visibility lets you write cleaner public APIs. The type system catches errors at write-time, not runtime.

Async programming with Fibers (lightweight concurrency), ReactPHP, and Swoole proves PHP can handle concurrent workloads. You don’t have to leave PHP for event-driven architecture anymore.

Is PHP perfect? No. Would I start a greenfield real-time gaming backend in PHP? Probably not. I’d reach for Go or Rust. But for web applications, APIs, and business software? PHP remains an excellent choice backed by decades of battle testing.

Advice to Junior Developers

If you’re new to development and considering PHP, here’s what I’d tell you:

Don’t let Twitter determine your tech stack. The loudest voices often have the least production experience. PHP powers successful companies, employs hundreds of thousands of developers, and has a job market that isn’t going anywhere.

Learn the modern ecosystem. Don’t learn PHP from 2010 tutorials. Start with a framework (Symfony or Laravel), use Composer, enable strict types, run PHPStan from day one. Modern PHP development looks nothing like the spaghetti code critics remember.

Understand the tradeoffs. Every language has them. PHP’s baggage is the stdlib inconsistencies and legacy code in the wild. Its strengths are ecosystem maturity, deployment simplicity, and a massive community. That’s a reasonable tradeoff for web development.

Watch what companies use, not what influencers tweet. WordPress, Shopify (admin), Slack’s API layer, Etsy, Wikipedia. These aren’t hobby projects.

I’ve seen PHP go from dismissed scripting language to enterprise-grade platform. I’ve watched the “PHP is dying” article get rewritten every few years with new predicted killers. And I’ve kept earning my living building systems that handle real traffic for real businesses.

PHP might be dying. It’s just been doing it for 24 years, and I suspect it’ll keep dying for another 24 while the rest of us ship code.