On Sun, Jun 28, 2026 at 10:03 AM Ilia <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Folks, I'm going to be blunt. If you want PHP to be the next COBOL, this >> is how you go about it. COBOL went from one of the more important languages >> out there in 1980 to a joke by 1995. PHP can fall just as fast. We've all >> seen the "PHP is dead" threads on LinkedIn. Knives are out. >> > > Gonna age myself, but I actually used COBOL, and its "death" has nothing > to do with OO but a plethora of other reasons, many tied to the great > programming languages that followed and it is not dead. > > I can understand the hesitation of adopting something this major. People >> remember the PHP 6 unicode disaster well. But there was never a fully >> working implementation of PHP 6. Async has a working implementation. >> There's rough edges, but there's something here. >> >> Change is scary, but it's the only constant. Async operation is the norm >> now. Object Oriented Code had become the norm by 1995. COBOL ignored it, >> and died as a result. Will PHP do the same now >> > > Async is a useful function no doubt, but in the context of a primarily web > programming language like PHP, I would argue the practical utility of the > functionality is relatively limited. >
Web Sockets. Without Async, PHP can't properly use these, and they will become as important if not more important than standard http requests in the future. Today there is no reason to use PHP for an app that wants to have Web Sockets - you have to use Node.js, Java, or C# (possibly Python - I don't know if it supports them). >
