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

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.

Because if you’ve never jumped into a car in subzero temperatures with freeze-your-face-off wind chill factors while frantically rubbing your legs up and down and screaming at the top of your lungs, “I FUCKING HATE IT HERE!” only to realize that your windshield wipers are frozen to the glass and you’re definitely going to have to get back out, you’ve never really truly lived.

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.

Because for those six whole weeks between June and August when the weather conditions are just right for a leisurely cruise around the lake with a cooler full of ice-cold Bud Light Lime and a few of your closest pals, it makes the pain in the ass winterization process and the exorbitant cost of boat storage for the rest of the year almost seem worth it, if you remembered to bring bug spray.

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.

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.

Because for those six whole weeks between June and August when the weather conditions are just right for a leisurely cruise around the lake with a cooler full of ice-cold Bud Light Lime and a few of your closest pals, it makes the pain in the ass winterization process and the exorbitant cost of boat storage for the rest of the year almost seem worth it, if you remembered to bring bug spray.

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.

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.

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.

Because instead of fighting about screen time with your teenager, you can fight about more important issues, like why nobody will give a shit if the jacket she’s refusing to wear looks too bulky in her backpack if she freezes to death at the bus stop.

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.

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Coursera a lot! It has a lot of great courses. But it takes some time to find a good course that is suitable for you. A lot of time I started a course and after I have done it halfway I realized this is not for me. So, there will be some time laps there. If you are totally new to Coursera and do not know how to take courses for free there, here is a six minutes tutorial for that:

Given the state of the world (or at least the United States) in 2020, it seems like we can’t agree on much. However, I’m sure we can find common ground on the fact we’d all like to live to a ripe old age, and we want to get there looking and feeling good.

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.