I have been in the web-tech industry (is that even a thing?) for the past 25+ years and what always surprised me was the hate PHP as a programming language received early on, while at the same time gaining a lot of popularity world-wide.

The hate usually stems from its massive “non-enterprise standards” that have caused years of insecure software, messy code bases and also questionable software designs: remember the times when we would send emails during sign-up in-sync and thus the whole HTTP request would be blocking or even failing depending on the SMTP server? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

However, at the same time, the popularity came from exactly that: being “non-enterprise”. This created an extremely low entry point for creating a server-side-rendered websites that could use a database as backend. Other languages were still catching up to this new thing called “the interwebs”. You did not need a CS degree to whip out something over a weekend and most likely that was also why Facebook was written in PHP. It was essentially our “vibecoding” equivalent back in the day. Even today it is also extremely cheap to run on shared web-hosting providers – no containers or VPS required.

PHP kept its momentum in popularity throughout the years due to three distinctive “renaissance”-events which also helped moving it into more online/web-based businesses:

1. Introduction of composer as package manager. Previously the community was split between PHPClasses.org, PEAR and random .zip files on homepages (as GitHub did not exist or was not popular enough in the early days). Packagist.org created a exponentially growing ecosystem of high quality libraries for various problems.
2. The formation of PHP-FIG/PSR. Created a good foundation and understanding across all developers, standardizing PHP code.
3. The rise in popularity of Laravel making it the de-facto choice of framework within PHP. It is not that PHP frameworks did not exist previously, but Laravel was the only framework that simplified the implementation of business logic and being extremely developer friendly.

Bonus: the relentless release cycle of PHP compared to its peers. Listening to the community on changes, improving performance year-on-year and locking down on security (Suhosin is deprecated these days).

All of this was not enough though and thus the “PHP is dead”-meme still lives today as our yearly mecca:

So why do I think PHP is going to die?

Let us be real. Even if PHP is not dead yet, it has lost a lot of its popularity already. Sure Mediawiki and WordPress are still carrying the torch, but I hardly see any companies anymore investing in it. But thats not even my point.

I think what made PHP a popular choice was the ability to essentially create a simple project over a weekend – and if you used Laravel, it would come with lots of bells and whistles out-of-the-box. At the same time you knew its limitations: performance and not the best code.

But what if you had the freedom to develop in any language and equally only take a weekend to create web-based project that has 10x the complexity, would you still chose PHP? With Codex or Claude you remove any personal constraints or limitations of being “stuck” with $language. But also what ever pulled you into writing PHP syntax is gone, as you are now distant from the AI output itself.

That is something we precisely did at DigitalTolk where we are slowly replacing smaller services written in Laravel to Go, reducing costs by 60% while additionally increasing performance for our customers. You can read more about it on my LinkedIn post:

Need a single distributable binary? No problem with Go/Rust/C(++) using Claude. Need to work with LLM? Sure Claude can do Python.
The advantages that made PHP still relevant are diminishing quickly. Why would the next generation of software engineers learn PHP? What edge does PHP still have compared to other languages?

The “4th renaissance”?

I am no PHP hater and either way, all of this is only my opinion. So I will bring some suggestions to the table that I think could push PHP back into a competitive direction by making it more cloud native and improving its base-line:

1. PHP needs to get rid of having Nginx/FastCGI as a requirement. Let PHP-FPM speak HTTP directly. If you want to terminate TLS via Nginx, it becomes a choice, not a requirement.
2. Make it a compiled language with virtual machine similar to Java. The times of recursively creating PHP-files to serve PHP-files are dated (*cough Smarty). Compilation with checks and strict typing will increase the code quality fundamentally.
3. Laravel, please do not make me run three processes: webapp, queue, cron. At least reduce it to just webapp, worker. No supervisord tricks. Natively.
4. WordPress, please make yourself cloud native by default. People have been looking for alternatives for years because its painful to scale, but it does not have to be. Lead by example, others will follow.

tl;dr

Is PHP dead? Not yet. Will PHP ever die? Likely if nothing changes – anyone still remembers Perl 🥲? Vibecoding has not only done a massive switch in the software/tech industry, but also changed the next generation of software engineers. Why learn PHP if you can get better results and better agility with any other language while vibecoding?
And the reality is most likely somewhere else: not only will PHP die, most likely many languages will seize in popularity due to AI.