On PHP

You've probably heard it from your hipster friends. PHP is dead, or at least it's dying. At least that's what I've been hearing since I became a developer in 2013. Even though these statements can not be backed by data, they seem to have a significant impact on what kind of developers and technology the cryptocurrency space keeps attracting.

Let me go out on a limb here. Imagine Bob. Bob is a developer and he's interested in building a product or a useful tool around some cryptocurrency. The fact that Bob is interested in "crypto" is a good indication that he likes new technology. His preference for new tech will very likely impact his technology stack. Bob knows about PHP, but everyone around him keeps saying that it's dead, and he prefers "new" tech anyways, so he goes with newer options like Node.js, Rust or Golang, maybe Python. You know, the hipster stack.

That's perfectly fine, nothing wrong with that. There are good use cases for each of those languages. In fact, it's probably easier to build your crypto project with anything but PHP. Due to lack of good libraries it can be frustrating to deal with Bitcoin on PHP at times. When I decided to implement BIP-70 at Satoshiwall, I couldn't find a single working BIP-70 library. I had to fork one and throw together pull requests from different developers to make it work. This is very time consuming and even depressing.

80% of the web runs on PHP

Now let that sink in. I built a BIP-70 payment server in order to accept Bitcoin Cash payments on my site, and there was no working library for the most popular server-side programming language in the world. I can only imagine how many developers gave up when they realized they need to build all that stuff from scratch, or that they would need to fix some old library nobody bothered to maintain.

We need to make things easier for PHP developers

We can't ignore the market leader in server-side programming languages. If BCH is supposed to be global peer-to-peer electronic cash, then web developers need to have an easier time implementing it into their existing infrastructure. This means we need to attract more PHP developers into the space, so they can build great tools that can be used by lots of other developers of said established programming language.

I'm telling you with great confidence that PHP isn't going anywhere. If the Bitcoin Cash community could somehow find a way to lower the barriers for PHP developers, I think that would be a great advantage over competing projects.