55 PHP Developer Jokes Only PHP Devs Truly Get

PHP is dead. It has been dead every year since 2004. Currently the corpse is powering roughly 75% of the web.

I told a Node developer I write PHP. He said, 'I'm so sorry.' I said, 'My salary isn't.'

Why is needle, haystack the argument order in strpos but haystack, needle in in_array? Because PHP was written by twelve different people who never met.

'0' == false is true. false == null is true. null == '0' is false. This is not a bug. This is a feature. This is also why we have ===.

A PHP developer walks into a bar, a Bar, a BAR, and an Object of type Bar. All four get served.

My favorite part of PHP 8 is being able to tell people I write modern PHP without lying.

Composer install: a chance to make coffee. Composer update: a chance to question your career.

Why do PHP developers love the question mark? Because `?->`, `??`, `??=`, and `?:` are the only operators that have ever truly understood us.

I named a variable $data. Six months later I came back and asked, 'data of what?' Past me did not leave a forwarding address.

PHP 5 to PHP 7 was a free 2x performance upgrade. My boss's response: 'Great, now we can run twice as many WordPress plugins.'

The `<?php` tag is mandatory. The `?>` tag is optional, eats trailing newlines, and has ruined more headers already sent errors than any other character in computing.

Why don't PHP developers play hide and seek? Because $_GET always finds you.

array_map(callback, array). array_filter(array, callback). array_reduce(array, callback). PHP: pick a lane. PHP: no.

Haters who haven't written PHP since 2010 are like film critics who walked out of Star Wars and never saw the rest of the saga. Yes, the prequels were rough. We're on the good ones now.

I switched from array() to [] in 2014. My senior dev called it a fad. He also still types out array() in 2017.

What's the difference between mysql_query, mysqli_query, and PDO? About fifteen years of you not updating that one legacy app.

PSR-12 is what we call it. My team's style guide is what we actually use. These two things are unrelated.

I asked the Laravel developer how he handles dependency injection. He said, 'The framework does it.' I asked the Symfony developer how he handles dependency injection. He handed me a 400-page book.

Before namespaces, we had Class_Name_With_Underscores_Forever. We called it the PEAR convention. We also called it the reason we drank.

My favorite PHP error: 'Cannot use object of type stdClass as array.' My second favorite: 'Cannot use array as object.' My third favorite: just looking at the data and not knowing which one I have.

JIT in PHP 8 made my benchmarks 20% faster and my CRUD app 0% faster. Worth it for the bragging rights.

Opcache is the unsung hero of PHP. It is also the reason your code changes don't take effect until you wonder why your code changes aren't taking effect.

I added type declarations to every function in the codebase. Three weeks later, we had caught more bugs than the previous two years of unit tests. The previous two years of unit tests had zero coverage. The bugs were still real.

Why did the PHP developer get into trouble with HR? He kept telling people he was loosely typed.

'PHP isn't a real language.' Says the developer whose framework wraps a templating engine that compiles to a language that runs on a runtime that ships with twelve flavors of `Date`.

PHP 5.6 reached end of life in 2018. The number of production servers running it in 2017? Also, 'yes.'

I opened a ten-year-old WordPress plugin. It had no namespaces, no Composer, no PSR-anything, and exactly one global called $wpdb. It also worked perfectly. That is the WordPress codebase in one anecdote.

A junior asked, 'Why do we still use PHP?' I showed him the W3Techs CMS share chart. He asked, 'Why do we still use WordPress?' I showed him my mortgage.

echo and print are both ways to output text. echo is faster. print returns a value. Neither one was the wrong choice. Both of them were.

Why do PHP developers love sandwiches? Because the `<?php` is the bread, the `?>` is the bread, and the HTML in the middle is the lettuce we definitely should have moved into a template engine.

I checked the PHP manual. There were 2,847 user-contributed comments on the strtotime page. None of them explained why 'next tuesday' on a Tuesday returns next next Tuesday.

Attributes arrived in PHP 8. For twelve years before that, we used docblock annotations and a regex parser called Doctrine. We didn't talk about it.

Why don't PHP developers trust stairs? Because they're always coercing them up and down.

I told the Go developer that PHP added named arguments. He asked, 'Wasn't that always there?' I showed him the changelog. He aged a year on the spot.

PHP-FPM is what powers your site. Mod_php is what your shared host is still secretly using in 2017. This is fine.

$_POST contains everything from the form. $_GET contains everything from the URL. $_REQUEST contains both, plus cookies, plus a lawsuit.

The composer.json says PHP ^7.2. The lock file says PHP ^7.2. The Dockerfile says PHP 8.1. The production server says PHP 5.6. Welcome to onboarding.

I asked the architect why he chose PHP for the new project in 2017. He said, 'Three reasons: I can hire for it, I can deploy it, and it's already faster than half the alternatives.' Then he muttered, 'Also Laravel is genuinely good now.'

Why is the elephant the PHP mascot? Because it never forgets the time you wrote register_globals = On.

'PHP is fine actually' is the only honest tech blog post title of the last decade. It also gets exactly zero shares from people who haven't written PHP since 2010.

How many PHP developers does it take to change a light bulb? One. But first he has to check if it's `null`, `''`, `0`, `'0'`, `false`, or an empty array. They all evaluate as falsy and exactly one of them is the actual bulb.

The Symfony console command finished in 0.04 seconds. The `composer install` that preceded it took four minutes. This is the eternal ratio of PHP work.

I wrote PHP for fifteen years before I learned about the spaceship operator. It was added in PHP 7. I had been writing PHP 7 for two years.

I forgot htmlspecialchars on one form field in 2014. I still get LinkedIn requests from the pentester who found it.

The `@` error suppression operator is the duct tape of PHP. It does not fix the leak. It just makes sure nobody hears it.

How do PHP developers debug? var_dump, die, refresh, repeat. The junior calls it primitive. The senior calls it production-grade.

var_dump shows the types. print_r shows the values. dd() shows both, kills the request, and dumps you straight into a Tailwind error page. Guess which one I added to the global namespace of every project I have ever touched.

PHP magic methods are called magic because nobody knows when they fire and everybody is afraid to ask. Look up __call once a year. Forget it again by Friday.

The `use` keyword imports a namespace. The `use` keyword imports a trait. The `use` keyword captures a variable into a closure. Three jobs, one word. PHP saw what JavaScript did with `function` and said, 'Hold my beer.'

I spent four hours debugging a Symfony service container issue. The fix was one line in services.yaml. The lesson was nothing. I will do it again next month.

Phinx vs Doctrine migrations vs Eloquent migrations. We picked one, switched twice, and now have three migration tables in the same database. Production has never been more honest about itself.

Every PHP team has a six-year conversation that starts with, 'We should just rewrite this in Go.' The conversation outlives the team. The PHP app outlives the conversation.

I ran du -sh on the repo. App code: 47 MB. vendor: 312 MB. The vendor directory is not part of the project. The vendor directory is the project. The app code is just the part we wrote between Composer installs.

Nobody has touched php-fpm.conf in this repo since 2019. The pm.max_children value is 5. The server has 32 cores. We do not speak of it. The site is up.

I ran php artisan in production exactly once. It put the site in maintenance mode at 2pm on a Tuesday and I never recovered the trust of the ops team. artisan stays on my laptop now.