Disclaimer: I’ve got 10+ years on my back as a PHP developer. I started using it when PHP4 was a little boy and PHP5 only a dream in Zend’s mind. I did a lot with it, loved it, cursed it, and saw it grow and evolve, sometimes with great shame. I still use it for some legacy projects, but it’s been a while since it’s not the language of my choice anymore. Also, I’m not affiliated with any framework or tool mentioned here.



TL;DR: If your project will rely on continually-running processes to function, avoid PHP.



In my opinion, a lot of the hatred that PHP receives misses the utter basic point: PHP is meant to die. It doesn’t mean that a perfectly capable (to some extent) programming language will disappear into nothingness, it just means that your PHP code can’t run forever. Now, 13 years after the first official release in 2000, that concept still looks valid to me.





A dying programming model



The core PHP feature follows the most simple programming workflow: get input data, process it, display the…