Is PHP still a relevant language in today’s day and age? I know a LOT of languages and it just never occurred to me to learn this one, because anyone I’ve ever been aware of writing a backend these days would either choose Node or one of several compiled languages. Lemmy uses Rust for it’s backend which is highly desireable, many people would have used Golang in the backend world if they desired performance and compilation, otherwise I don’t know why you wouldn’t just use Typescript. Makes it hard to contribute to IMO.
Yes, why wouldn’t it be. It’s been in active development and PHP 8 is actually pretty decent for fast prototyping (which this site is).
Has pretty great performance nowadays too. I’ve seen benchmarks showing it performing 3x faster on web stuff than python (obviously there are faster choices than either and Python works well with a lot of non web stuff that PHP can’t do well) - PHP deservedly earned it’s bad rap, but they have really turned things around and now I love using it.
Idk anything about it but from reading some of the code it looks like Java but with weird syntax. Not a big forced OOP fan.
No, OOP is optional in PHP.
Good to know, maybe I’ll pick up a book. I try to learn a new language every year.
When I say “optional”, I mean you can just create a filename.php and start putting lines of code into it, and it’ll work fine. But, these days OOP is favored by most and pretty much everyone is using it. So if you are working on code that other people have written, classes are everywhere.
A lot of Wordpress code is non-OOP, though.