PHP

Quora Answer : Are big companies using PHP bothered by the fact that a lot of people say that PHP is a bad programming language?

Jun 8, 2014

Probably not.

PHP is a "trade-off" language. It has many ugly flaws, but it has some advantages, that other languages still can't match. And it's likely that any large company that's heavily dependent on PHP, grew to be big, partly because of those advantages.

And, if you're really a big company you can do like Facebook did, and basically rewrite a lot of the infrastructure behind PHP to make it a better, more secure and suitable language for you.

Longer term, all large technologically literate companies will be looking at better / cooler languages. They'll continue to use PHP for the front-end (keeping their investment in PHP templates) but push off more back-end processing to higher performance, more secure, less bug-encouraging languages.

The other trend is that with the rise of HTML5 and faster Javascript VMs, more and more of the work of dynamically composing web-pages happens on the client and is written in Javascript. So I'd guess that PHP's niche for assembling pages dynamically on the server is probably shrinking. I'd wouldn't be much surprised if any large, mature system, originally written in PHP, is seeing PHP diminishing, as more of it migrates to client-side.

So any large company needs to be aware of trends and opportunities. But I wouldn't panic. PHP has a lot of organic shrinkage ahead of it, without someone needing to make a dramatic decision to kill / rewrite it.