Learn PHP in 2026 (Yes, Really)

I can believe it’s much improved and I wouldn’t look down on anyone for using it.

But it’s still never going to be a language I like, and I’m yet to encounter any of these modern codebases in the wild. It’s invariably a crusty old relic, much closer to the PHP of 2006 than the PHP of 2026.

Please, if you want to persuade me, do it yourself. If you don’t believe in it enough to go through the effort to write the article, and instead ask an LLM to do it, it’s not going to convince me.

I use bunch of PHP files for personal/work stuff. Because the setup is very easy: just install nginx and enable php+fastcgi extension. Then just edit the files, no restart is needed. Also I don't need frontend and backend. Just echo html in php file :)

I need to figure out a way to detect the Medium logo and make my browser render a picture of a happy koala with a mug of coffee telling me to go find some other entertainment, because this ain't it.

> There was no build step and no deployment pipeline. You changed a .php file. You refreshed the browser. The change was live. This was fast. It was messy. The language let you mix HTML and SQL in the same file. It did not stop you from writing spaghetti

Oh the smell! It's so obvious.

I wonder why though, why does every single AI write like this? There are barely any variance and everything looks exactly the same. Youtube, blogs, linkedin, it is so obvious that everyone is using the same thing, is this even model specific?

I've never been a fan of AI polishing my writings, but now I wouldn't even get it grammar checked. All of my writing that I expect people to read, particularly philosophy and rationale, are one shot stuff that came out of keyboard like this one.

Everyone is familiar with different things. As long as you can complete your work with the programming language you are familiar with, that's fine. As for which language to learn, it depends on personal interest

If you are using an LLM to write code you should grab the strongest typed thing available in the domain/organization.. Rust, Scala, Typescript, F#, etc.

Here's a chart to replace the mockup with: https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_ma...

According to this data (the same data referenced by WordPress marketing blog posts[1], if it's legit enough for them it's legit enough for me) WordPress usage across the web stopped growing almost all at once in 2021, with the beginning of a decline this year.

You can see an increase of other contenders (Shopify, for example) but of note is also None, which is probably related to how LLMs have been making it incredibly easy to deliver a website even without a CMS.

1: https://wordpress.com/blog/2025/04/17/wordpress-market-share...

The fact PHP finally has the features of other mature languages is just table stakes I guess?

IMO the article failed articulating what is PHP's unique selling point.

php has a decent standard library and the edit/reload workflow suits llms quite well but I wouldn't learn it if I didn't already know it in 2026

Been using PHP for 20 years and have built multiple startups with it that went from ideas to exits.

Today's PHP is better than it has ever been. Are there some things that are rough around the edges? yes ofc. But there is no language that doesn't have that. It's all trade-offs.

Last week I switched from Nginx+FPM to FrankenPHP and my god even the deployment experience got 10x better.

Safe to say that if you haven't tried the language, give it a shot. Within a few days you'll know if it's a good fit for you or not!

In my professional career I've used Python, Ruby, TypeScript, Groovy, but in personal projects I always go with PHP. I'm just more productive with it. And I don't use all of the modern niceties of PHP, I use it exactly like it's still 2010. In my opinion, the dislike towards PHP stems from the same love for complexity that gave us all of the FP-obsession from roughly 2010-2020 (Scala, Clojure, F#, etc.)

Isn't PHP's biggest selling point that you can ship fast?

Can you not ship fast with a much faster language right now using LLMs?

“false” === true because it’s not an empty string. It’s the same now that it used to be 10 years ago. The PHP equality operator is a meme, not even a joke

Aside from the LLM smell, the most egregious thing about this article to me is simply implying that it's going to be much of a surprise to people that PHP has improved since the "fractal of bad design" days. The most popular Hacker News post that matches "php" in HN Algolia is this post from 2019:

https://stitcher.io/blog/php-in-2019

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19917655

And while sentiment is understandably mixed even then, I actually think a lot of people have already come around on PHP as being "not as bad as it once was", if not even "good".

Some of its reputation, though, hinges not on out-of-date internet commentary, but instead on the fact that in practice a lot of the PHP code that's still in production today is simply legacy code and not up to modern standards, and most of the time when someone says PHP, they really mean that PHP. I think that is actually the thing that is holding PHP back hard outside of bubbles like HN. And honestly, even though I don't hate modern PHP, I don't have many codebases that come to mind when I think about modern PHP that are exemplary. I actually was relatively impressed with the s9e TextFormatter library used by phpBB3 when I looked at it, but even that is dated by today's standards.

Still, I think that PHP has an undeservedly bad reputation relative to other languages. I've recently come back into Python lately after having not really touched a ton of Python in a while and I gotta say, other than `uv` and `ty`, I don't feel a whole lot has improved in Python land. It's not that greenlets and gevent were fantastic or anything, but I thought it was satisfactory enough. Now that there's also asyncio, it feels like a nightmare trying to untangle old code and bring it into the async future... So many things just don't really work in this world, like old-school lazy fetching in SQLAlchemy. Python was most famous for the horrible Python 3000 migration, but so many years later and I'm not sure how much was really learned as reconciling greenlet and asyncio worlds feels like yet another Sisyphean task of trying to rebuild everything at once. OK, it isn't as bad, especially since you can at least wrap sync code into thread pools, but it definitely is an absolute PITA, and I feel like what we're getting out of it doesn't exceed what we're putting in.

So that's my thoughts. Internet commentary is probably no longer PHP's biggest enemy; instead, it's more like its own past successes. (And, also, the fact that we easily forgive the tools we use regularly for the faults that we have been used to for years.)