# PHP 295 Hacker News commenters recommended PHP and 295 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 20 years (28 owners). **Verdict:** A long-lived web language that has improved a lot, with easy deployment, few dependencies and code that keeps working; critics cite recurring security vulnerabilities and breaking changes. ## Why people recommend it - Modern versions greatly improved (6 comments): "I know I used to have the impression of PHP as a messy language because I last worked with PHP4. It's come a long way since then" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48250575)) "The amount of hard work that the PHP community has done to advance and keep their language relevant is impressive and admirable" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49441764)) "the syntax has always been awful and is even more degraded now, but the ecosystem is globally in a much better place" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46470028)) - Simple to deploy web apps (4 comments): "far less deployment friction and better aesthetics than Perl did on machines where you didn't have admin access" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46183637)) "You can still build web apps using more basic technologies like PHP, MySQL/Postgres, and just using vanilla JS." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46497271)) "It was easy to deploy PHP web apps since they could be readily dropped in your htdocs or public_html directory" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45981610)) - Stable, no stack churn (3 comments): "It worked great and we hadn't encountered business problems that couldn't be fairly easily solved within the ecosystem." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45806987)) "PHP is a reasonable choice if you care about writing something that will still work out of the box 10 years from now." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45991128)) "One of the best features of PHP is that you don't have to learn and unlearn new tech stacks every few years." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48019877)) - Request-per-process model avoids bugs (2 comments): "Entire classes of bugs that are common in Java, C/C++, .NET and other true multi-threaded environments simply cannot exist in the PHP world at all" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47798784)) "the model of a single thread responding to a request then discarding everything in PHP/Hack is virtually ideal" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46541958)) ## What people warn about - Recurring security vulnerabilities (4 comments): "I like PHP and I use it everyday. What concerns me about incidents like this isn't just the vuln itself, but how much access a compromised PHP process can have to the rest of the system." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50180335)) "But it also has become a liability when they are all now scared that the server can be easily taken over." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50180376)) "It's almost common knowledge that any PHP site can be hacked by intelligence agencies or state actors due to either errors in the runtime or the solutions themselves." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50204898)) - Breaks backward compatibility (3 comments): "The PHP team keeps breaking backward compatibility and trying to introduce new features instead of focusing on fixing bugs and hardening the compiler." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50184378)) "now they overcorrected with types, annotations and breaking backwards compatibility with every release so that no old code base can remain intact" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45991235)) "Instead of creating better software they have always tried to add features with no consideration of backward compatibility." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50197195)) - New releases add little value (2 comments): "It's a mess and more bug prone than just nesting the functions." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45990206)) "The new array_first() and array_last() functions are nice, everything else is either reimplantation of existing features" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45992150)) - Historic footguns and messy design (3 comments): "core ergonomics is significantly lagging behind most other backend languages despite improvements in some areas" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45991245)) "I simply cannot bring myself to attempt it again. I once had to rewrite large chunks of a site because it simply couldn't deal with the fact that a string had an apostrophe in it." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49442150)) "PHP had plenty of magic and footguns, magic_quotes, register_globals, mysql_real_escape_string, errors with stacktraces leaking into the HTML output by default" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47831407)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Rust](https://hackerapproved.com/p/rust.md): 2039 recommend - [Go](https://hackerapproved.com/p/go-programming-language.md): 1254 recommend - [Python](https://hackerapproved.com/p/python.md): 1067 recommend - [Zig](https://hackerapproved.com/p/zig.md): 743 recommend - [TypeScript](https://hackerapproved.com/p/typescript.md): 574 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "PHP", https://hackerapproved.com/p/php/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).