The nullish coalescing operator makes sure that null and undefined values are not picked and it is perfect for cases whe

The answer to that question is for a different post entirely. The point I’m trying to make is that PHP as a language is as much “enterprise ready” as any other language. It depends entirely on how you use it.,I’m not saying that so called “beautiful languages” are bad choices, but it definitely should not be your determining factor. Java is downright ugly, yet is one of the world most popular languages. Arguing against the use of PHP because it is ugly is just silly.,But even still, I don’t really think it’s true. It probably comes from the age old practise of using PHP directly in HTML (whish is ugly). The thing is: we really don’t do that anymore. In fact, it’s seriously frowned upon.,This is the only one that has maybe a thread of truth to it, but it’s more complicated than you think. In truth, PHP is able scale just fine, if you write decent code. When people say that PHP doesn’t scale they usually referring to the idea that applications written in PHP might not be able to handle very large numbers of requests (like in the millions). The thing is that is still not that simple and I think a lot of the misconception comes from WordPress, which, until recently was well known for having scalability issues.,This is probably another reason to try Typescript as Javascript does an automatic type conversion on the fly which may not be what you are expecting. “Truthy” values become “true” and “Falsy” values become “false”. Doing math between number and string may actually work or result in a string concatenation. Numbers almost always turn “Falsy” values into “zero” and “Truthy” into “one”.,You can’t talk about scalability without also talking about infrastructure. If you’re hosting a WordPress blog on a simple shared hosting and you suddenly get tens of thousands of hits… well that could likely be a problem and your host is going to send you a nasty email, or at least bill you a lot more than you were expecting.,Just a side note, some time ago I was a part of a small team which built and deployed an events management platform onto the internal network of one of South Africa’s foremost financial institutions (I might write something about my experiences with that). The app was written entirely in PHP and JavaScript. And with the Covid-19 pandemic in full swing, the system was under extreme pressure, yet it has handled almost all of it. We’ve had a few hiccups, but nothing that couldn’t solved quickly.,The purpose of this article was to put in one place most of the data wrangling and visualization techniques you’d need as a beginner or intermediate time series analyst. First, we saw how to convert an ordinary dataframe into a powerful datetime object and put that into use for filtering and visualizing. In the second part, we’ve created 8 different plots using different techniques to visualize time series. The next step would be to go ahead and pick a different dataset, reproduce the results and play with different plotting parameters.,You have to be kidding me. I’ve saved the most irritating for last. If you are selecting your tech stack based on how nice it looks, then you’re doing it wrong and you need to seriously re-evaluate your choices.,IIFE is an excellent way to execute things as early as possible which you can take advantage of to set up some stuff before the rest of the code starts running. You can also use it to initialize small libraries with a simple API that allows you to encapsulate some complex logic and expose an object you can use to interact with similar to how jQuery is built.,As a bit of proof, Slack, the messaging platform that tried to replace email, has milllions of users, all of whom connect every single day to a system who’s backend is written in PHP. If that’s not a story of how PHP can scale, then I don’t know what is. Many people cite Facebook as a good example, and although I believe Facebook probably still uses PHP in some form, I think they’ve probably moved much of their application away from PHP. But, to be honest, Facebook is a bit of a special case.,I sometimes think the question of scalability is also a bit of an over exaggeration. In my 20 years of writing things in PHP, I have never had to deal with “millions of requests” per second. Not even close. The majority of us are not going to be building the next Facebook, no matter how much we like to dream about doing just that. In reality we build apps that are far more targeted. We deal with specific industries, often in specific countries and we never have to worry about dealing with more than a few hundred requests per second. For many of the projects we’re involved in, that would be large. It doesn’t mean that what we do isn’t important, it just means we don’t need to think about that sort of scale. Scaling applications to deal with millions of requests just isn’t a part of our normal day-to-day.,Always turn things you do repeatedly into small generic functions that you can reuse later on. As a developer, you should not be repeating things and small functions make them easy to test and reuse.,Scaling an application involves a lot more than just your language choice. There’s a lot of moving parts and I get frustrated when PHP takes the brunt of the blame. Newer versions of PHP, in the right environment and configured correctly, are more than capable of dealing with a large number of requests per second. Laravel Vapor, which is a first-party serverless platform for Laravel applications running on AWS, has some really impressive numbers.,Why? I really don’t get where this comes from. But it’s a big one. What makes a language “enterprise ready”? How is one language more enterprise ready than another? Java is probably one of the most popular languages in the enterprise space, but it’s not because Java itself is enterprise ready. It’s because of the existance of the Java EE Platform. I’m no Java developer, so I stand to be corrected here, but from what I understand, Java EE is a platform on which enterprise applications are built. Sounds kinda like a framework, right? So maybe the question should be “is enterprise ready?”