PHP's biggest problem...

I'm pretty sure like the PHP Foundation is they they know what they are doing, but I'm going to be honest with you. If I were involved, I would stop everything. I would literally not do a release for the next 2 years until I get the proper website for this. I would stop everything. I don't care about short enums, I don't care about clamp functions, I don't care about any of the features we we talked today until this website gets fixed. This would be the priority number one in my opinion if I were involved in the PHP Foundation. Why even matters that we have generics, partial function application, whatever. Like why does that matters if we cannot have a beautiful website? This is the first impression I would get when I look at PHP. This is the first impression I get as a non-PHP developer. I would Google PHP, I would open the website, and then I get this 50-years-old website. Come on. Today we're reacting to the PHP biggest problem, new video by Brent from JetBrains. I don't know exactly what we'll be talking about. I know he'll be mentioning some marketing stuff about PHP, but let's react into it, and I'm going to tell you my thoughts while we are watching this together. Meanwhile, subscribe to channel, blah blah blah, you know the drill. PHP itself is pretty solid. It has an incredibly rich ecosystem. Tooling has seen significant growth. One thing that's fun already is that he's literally just mentioning new stuff. Laravel, Magoo, and packages, all of that stuff literally came in the last decade. Well, last 15 years at least. So, PHP have literally became way better than before. 100% sure. It's much different than before. past 10 years or so. The foundation ensures sustainable [music] development. AI adoption is is actually quite high compared to other languages, probably because of the vast amounts of of PHP code online out [music] there that these models have been trained on. Design by committee, the way PHP is designed and and evolves is not ideal, um but I don't know if it's not ideal. I'm going to be honest with you. I kind of appreciate a little bit the fact that the PHP internals move slowly. Like we have seen other ecosystems where things just go too fast. I don't want to name them, but you know what I'm talking about. Now, I kind of appreciate that that is people very excited about having stuff like generics, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. But then we have this PHP internals team who really like go slowly and make sure like everyone is happy with it and make sure it doesn't break people's applications. So, they think about every single edge case and I kind of appreciate that. Still, the language continues to evolve anyway, so I wouldn't say that that [music] is the issue. PHP's biggest issue is is marketing. And I know that's super boring. As a programmer myself, I don't have a particular interest in marketing. But if we continue to do all the great things I've mentioned before, they will not have the [music] impact we would like unless we have proper marketing for PHP. Dear Shtat, this is what I have been telling people for the last 10 years. Not about PHP, but about anything you put out. 20% is the actual code and now with AI it's like 1%. Like if you want to do something, you just prompt it, bam, done. The rest of it, like 80%, it's marketing, okay? It's literally marketing. Like how do you go to market? How you put your tool on the hands of people? In the Laravel ecosystem, the people around Laravel really put a lot of effort on this stuff. That's why there is a lot of adoption around the Laravel tooling in Laravel ecosystem in general. Because once we do something, the rest 80% is thinking like, okay, will I do a video about this? Will I do an article about this? How do I make like this installation instructions as much easier as possible so everyone can use it without any friction. This is not only valid for PHP, but like in software in general, every single time you do something, you need to think about how I will put this on every single developer in the planet. That's not only like videos or articles, it's about having a good readme, it's about having a nice collaboration with someone, for example. That's literally the difference between something that gets adoption and something that is way better, but nobody is using it. And we have seen thousands of examples like this out there. So, marketing is crucial. One example is Laravel. You may like, dislike Laravel. You may even love or hate it, but you cannot deny that it is the single most successful PHP project out there. Okay, maybe second if we count WordPress. But, Laravel has nailed the marketing machine and it has done so from the very beginning. It's now being upscaled, of course, but they have done great marketing from the very start. I myself have been working at JetBrains now for more than 4 years. And I've learned a lot about marketing myself. It's not my primary area of interest, which is why I'm a developer advocate and not not a marketing manager. But, effective marketing works. It's crucial for any kind of project and that includes open source projects like PHP. I think this is a task the foundation Even the project that Brent is developing right now, which is called Tempest PHP, which it has decent adoption, like we see literally, I think it's a 2,000 GitHub stars already. But, he sees marketing. He's like live streaming about it. He's have a beautiful read me, beautiful documentation, frequently mentions Tempest PHP. He has been building this audience for himself for the last like 5, 10 years. So, that also counts. Marketing is not everything, but it's like crucial for the success of anything, really. should take upon themselves if their mission is truly to ensure the long-term prosperity of the PHP language. So, here are my concrete suggestions. First, if you want PHP to be perceived as a modern language, make sure its website reflects that. I'm pretty sure like the PHP foundation has they they know what they are doing, but I'm going to be honest with you. If I were involved, I would stop everything. I would literally not do a release for the next 2 years until I get the proper website for this. I would stop everything. I don't care about sort enums, I don't care about clamp priority number one, in my opinion, if I partial function application, whatever, like why does that matters if we cannot and then I get this 50 years old website. Come on. It's time waiting for back-end developer. Look at this checkbox, dude. All this stuff, uh, "Judo, I'd take the following. I'd rather to have people that cares about generics more than looking of its website." That's not the question, dude. If you care about PHP, you care about its adoption. I want my profession to live forever. I want my language live forever. I want my PHP community, my Laravel community to be here forever. I want to be like 60 years old and still be doing PHP and Laravel. And for that to happen, ideally, we would have adoption. We need adoption. We need new kids doing PHP. We need this new generation doing PHP. Now, let's just compare. I'm going to give you the comparison, okay? Rust is one of the best languages out there. Just look at the difference. It's just so much more much better. And it's not like insanely better, but like logo-wise, the navigation-wise, documentation, read the book. It's just so much better than we already have in PHP. This to say that if I were involved in the PHP Foundation, I would just stop all the development. I would stop everything, and I would make sure within the next 3 months this website looks gorgeous. was to redesign the website for free. Pay a proper design agency who knows what they are doing. Sec- Exactly what I just said. So funny. -ond, pay someone to work full-time on the docs, so that people can actually learn PHP effectively. Next, as a community, we should invest in paying conference speakers to go into conferences outside the PHP bubble to actually talk about PHP to people who don't use it. We need to spread the word. We should I actually don't agree with Brent on this one. The PHP foundation, not only the PHP foundation, also Laravel, Symphony, they should actually bring together all the influencers on the sphere. Like we have a lot of good people doing content, you know, Adam Francis, myself, I think I do good content, Brent and everyone. I think these brands like Laravel, Symphony, the PHP foundation, they should have like interest on having us making content basically. viewers as well. I kind of would love to just be reached by PHP foundation. Hey Nuno, I love that you are doing PHP content. I would go to your channel for example. Having them offer themselves to go to the channels. Also like potentially financially support some of us, potentially developing the a collaboration that would have more people doing PHP content on YouTube and Twitch basically. Invest in social media. And I get it, some people don't like X, some people don't like Reddit. But the fact is a big chunk of the target audience for PHP is on those platforms. And I think we should leave politics at home and and be where the people are. If anything, PHP can be a positive voice in platforms that might otherwise be rather negative. I think PHP should be everywhere on X, Instagram, Reddit, newsletters, blog, TikTok even, Facebook, LinkedIn. And this is a full-time job, no doubt. Next point and I've lost count. Um I don't know if it's a full-time job. Just take me as an example. I go work full-time for Laravel. And my socials are super active. My Twitter is active, my LinkedIn is active, YouTube is active. Just hire someone that knows what they are doing for content in general. We should make internals accessible, which means no more mailing list, and we should have someone blog and vlog about what's going on in the PHP internal land. Yeah, this is probably what he meant about having someone full-time. It's someone that does kind of everything. Regarding the mailing list, it's it's kind of hilarious that it's still like a mailing list. That's probably something I would like change if I were involved. I would like literally change. They could go GitHub for example, and then it's done. Like GitHub is so much better for discussions, honestly. What is mailing list exactly? Like, you know, that's a problem already if you don't know what it is. They discuss RFCs through mailing list. If I'm honest with you, I I think they should go just go GitHub, and that's it. You know, they go GitHub like any other language, and they discuss, they use like GitHub threads, GitHub discussions, pull requests, issues, and this is so much better. It's to show people how much the language is being worked on, and draw them into the story. My final point here is that we should invest in high-impact features that can be marketed, and actually market them when they are added to the language, because I think we actually have quite a lot of high-impact features recently, and and we should do a better job at telling the world about these really cool things in PHP. So, what I'm listing is probably three to four full-time jobs, at least within my frame of reference at JetBrains. If you really want PHP to thrive, we need to invest [music] in what matters most. This was a reaction to Brent's video about the PHP biggest problem. If you enjoyed, don't forget to subscribe this channel, put like. Also, check my main channel. It's absolutely awesome. Love you all. Peace out. And done.