PHP Is Losing Its Edge as AI Makes Programming Languages Less Important

Summary

After more than 25 years in web technology, the author argues that PHP's defining advantage, its low barrier to building database-backed server-rendered websites quickly and cheaply, is being eroded by AI-assisted programming. PHP became widely used partly because it was accessible, inexpensive to host, and less constrained by enterprise conventions, while Composer and Packagist, PHP-FIG/PSR standards, Laravel, and regular language improvements helped sustain its ecosystem. The author says PHP has nevertheless lost popularity and that companies increasingly invest in other languages, even though WordPress and MediaWiki remain important users. Tools such as Codex and Claude let developers work productively in languages they may not know well, reducing the advantage of learning PHP specifically and making it easier to choose a language for performance, deployment, or other technical reasons. At DigitalTolk, the author says smaller Laravel services are being replaced with Go, reducing costs by 60% while improving performance for customers. The article presents this as an opinion rather than a prediction supported by formal market data, and it acknowledges that PHP is not yet dead. To remain competitive, it proposes direct HTTP support in PHP-FPM, a compiled or virtual-machine-based execution model with stronger checks and typing, simpler native handling of web and worker processes in Laravel, and making WordPress cloud-native by default. Its broader conclusion is that AI-assisted development may reduce the popularity of many programming languages, not only PHP, unless their practical advantages remain clear.