What we have is that one government, lets call it the States of Merica, funds & trains freedom fighters in a country called Lyria. Sometime after this Lyria is thrown into huge & devastating civil war against the regime where the opposing terrorist forms a new entity, the Salami State.

The civil war results in massive refugee crisis. Refugees flees north into the big trade union called Äuropean Club, ÄC. ÄC happens to be allied with States of Merica. Terrorists from the Salami State infiltrates the refugees and travels to ÄC where they commit a horrific terrorist attack in the capital city of Sirap. President of the States of Merica is chocked by these horrible news and pledges to help it's friends in the ÄC.

This leads the ÄC to adopt surveillance measures to track any potential terrorist. To its help it uses the knowhow and infrastructure from their close friends States of Merica (obviously).

When the civil war in Lyria nears it end and the Salami State is almost defeated, suddenly the winning Lyrian regime commits a gas attack on innocent civilians in a Salami State stronghold. ÄC and States of Merica condemns the gas attack and bombs the Lyrian regime as punishment. The freedom fighters rejoice because they now can fight for freedom a few more years.

The Salami State still exists and continue to get help from somewhere, unknown by whom, and commits more terrorist attacks in ÄC, in cities like Ockholm and Womanchester, because ÄC still haven't fixed it's border problem, but coincidentally ÄC has instead developed an excellent surveillance program, which is if course needed when the border is wide opened to the Salami state, duh!

All this is of course highly speculative and shares no resemblance with the real world.

So yes, if we fix terrorism because of like uh poverty, it can probably be solved.

What I was trying to say was that the inheritance based OOP was sold as the ultimate problem solver.

We all remember programming classes with Hello World like examples of Cat inherits from Animal.

Problem is of course that in the real world is never that simple so the inheritance based model turned out many times to be a mess because it was applied to problems where it didn’t fit.

That doesn’t mean that inheritance based OOP has its place, it does, but that is usually in very specific domains.

https://stackoverflow.com/a/3073818

but because early PHP was more simplistic than Perl it only has $.

Powershell also uses $ for variables.

Regardless of etymology of the $ sign and the usefulness of it, personally I like it because it makes it easier for me when I'm reading code, especially if you are scanning fast, to differentiate variables from symbols. Yes, you can get that with your editor too, but for me it is easier to associate the $ sign with a variable rather than a specific color, sometimes you don't have coloring available like when in command line going thru diffs, cat, nano etc.

It has somewhat improved with Spring Boot, but still to be avoided.

Database layer in Spring, especially if you combine it with the monstrosity called Hibernate, is enough to apply to an insane asylum. Trying to debug what combinations of annotations that work and doesn't work is time you could have used writing PHP instead and get results.

The idea that you can annotate a SQL schema & query language into a Java class with annotations is one of the most asinine ideas I ever come across.

And don't get me started on Java collections.

There will always be something negative regardless of what you pick, problem is to decide what your core values are when writing different types of software. If you don't, you are just comparing apples to oranges.

When it comes to PHP, core values are usually things that has to do with tooling, server architecture & deployment, not much the language (syntax, expressions, lambdas, classes etc) it self, except maybe it is easy to learn & use.

This means that developers who comes from a background of that the language itself is the most important part of a project will most of the time just get confused what PHP is about.

If you need a framework, look for something small, small enough to read thru and understand in one hour.

And that unfortunate school of thought created the Java mythos that spread to many languages, not only PHP, eg JavaScript (everyone trying to write inheritance based OOP in a prototype based language).

Few years ago the mythos changed somewhat to every programming language should be functional.

Thus it is not a specific PHP problem, it is common problem of trend sensitivity in programming culture.

And the funny thing is that much of the critique against PHP, like in this thread, is in the form of "why isn’t PHP like the other programming languages?"

But agree PHP should go it’s own way, it has much to contribute to the world still and it feels like it has started to create its own path again.

If it is the case then you have two options, ban YouTube or add more government regulation.

Let them, with the poison, regulate themselves doesn’t make sense if you agree with that premise except if you think some poison is ok.

Apache is almost as easy, download zip, unpack & configure apache conf to use your php.

MySQL is somewhat more complicated because you need to run an setup script after unpacking the zip.

let’s split our project into multiple libraries so it can be reused within the company or even better if we put it on GitHub everyone can use it.

After a few months you notice nobody within the company cares about your nicely versioned libraries and on GitHub you get more and more complaints that the libraries are very limited and need more features.

After that you merge everything back into your monorepo and try to forget all the time wasted on git bureaucracy, versioning, dependency handling and syncing changes between repos.

Very good setup that will solve your problems relatively fast and can be running for years without much maintenance.

There is no point of using anything else to do webpages. These technologies are tested and tried and works. Tons of documentation.

Ignore ideas that says you need to use fancy modern technologies, that is what has ruined the web and web development.

What is important is to follow best practices and web standards and that is true regardless of what technology you choose.

If it is more prevalent than in other societies then you can definitely call it a phenomenon.