When comparing PHP vs Kotlin, the Slant community recommends Kotlin for most people. In the question“What is the best programming language to learn first?” Kotlin is ranked 24th while PHP is ranked 33rd. The most important reason people chose Kotlin is:
Since Kotlin is made by Jetbrains (the developers of IntelliJ IDEA) so it stands to reason that the IntelliJ support for Kotlin is also great. Besides that, Kotlin also works well with existing Java tools such as Eclipse, Maven, Gradle, Android Studio, etc...
Specs
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Pros
Pro One of the most common languages
According to the 2015 Stack Overflow Developer Survey (26,086 people surveyed), PHP was the 5th most popular/used language at 29.7%.
Pro Lots of tutorials online
Pro Used by most common CMS platforms
Many clients are looking for an easy-to-update web site that's flexible and free. Drupal and Wordpress fill those needs very well.
Pro Most prominent language for web applications
Part of the de facto standard web application stack.
Pro Great third-party package manager
PHP standard library is somewhat subpar, but if you need plugins, language features, composer has them all( you can even puzzle together a custom framework from composer).
Pro Fast
Since 7.x was released, PHP has become a pretty fast language.
Pro Lots of PHP frameworks available which help with development
PHP people love frameworks, and with frameworks such as Laravel, you can build a web app or API really fast (Facades, ORMs, scaffolding etc.)
Pro Great documentation
Pro Great tooling support
Since Kotlin is made by Jetbrains (the developers of IntelliJ IDEA) so it stands to reason that the IntelliJ support for Kotlin is also great. Besides that, Kotlin also works well with existing Java tools such as Eclipse, Maven, Gradle, Android Studio, etc...
Pro Easy adoption for existing Java programmers
Kotlin runs on the JVM and Java interoperability has been one of the main objectives since the language was born. It runs everywhere Java does; web servers, mobile devices (Android), and desktop applications. It also works with all the major tools in the Java ecosystem like Eclipse, IntelliJ, Maven, Ant, Gradle, Spring Boot, etc.
All of this makes adoption extremely easy even for existing Java projects. On top of this there's also ensured Type safety and less boilerplate code needed.
Pro Easy to learn if you have prior programming experience
Kotlin's syntax is extremely easy to understand. The language can be picked up in a few hours just by reading the language reference.
Pro No runtime overhead
The standard library is relatively small and tight. It mostly consists of focused extensions of the Java standard library and as such adds no additional runtime overhead to existing Java projects.
Pro Officially supported for Android development
Starting with version 3.0 of Android Studio, Kotlin support will be built-in. This means that it's now easier than ever to use Kotlin for existing Android projects or even start writing Android apps only with Kotlin from scratch.
This also means that Kotlin and Kotlin plugins for Android Studio will be fully supported in the future and their likelihood of being abandoned is quite small since Google is fully embracing the language for their Android ecosystem (alongside Java and C++).
Pro Low-risk adoption for existing Java codebases
Since it has such a good interoperability with Java, Java libraries, and Java tools. It can be adopted for an existing Java codebase at little to no cost. The codebase can be converted from Java to Kotlin little by little without ever disrupting the functionality of the application itself.
Pro Does not impose a particular philosophy of programming
It's not overly OOP like Java and it does not enforce strict functional paradigms either.
Pro Is built to solve industrial problems
Kotlin has been designed and built by developers who have an industrial background and not an academic one. As such, it tries to solve issues mostly found in industrial settings. For example, the Kotlin type system helps developers avoid null pointer exceptions. Reasearch languages usually do not have null
at all, but APIs and large codebases usually need null
.
Cons
Con Poorly designed language
Despite its widespread use, PHP is generally looked upon poorly from a design point of view. The consistency of function names and function argument order, lazily and borderline non-functional implementation of object oriented programming, can only receive requests via POST methods, slow version adoption (the PHP you learn right now may not work on every webserver you'll work on), and a focus on "hacking things together" rather than "doing it right". These are all very common complaints when it comes to working with PHP. While not a bad language to learn, PHP is not at all a good language to learn first, as it will probably teach bad habits.
Con Immense catalog of insecure frameworks
The most serious security problems in websites on the web today are almost universally found in popular PHP frameworks, CMS platforms, libraries and code samples, almost all stemming from poor language design, bad tutorials and awful resources.
Con After python, probably one of the worst languages ever
Con Poorly designed language, awful syntax & luckily on the decline
Nobody in their right mind is using PHP for new software, if you decide to learn it as your first language you'll be stuck working in teams with old developers who have had no interest in the computer programming field since they landed their first job while maintaining some 2000 era archaic website codebase.
Con Most tutorials are out of date
A lot of very bad tutorials are still widely circulated among beginners, and these tutorials teach very poor programming practices.
Con Most resources are poorly-written
Few resources exemplify the "correct" or secure use of features.
Con Interpreter being too permissive
If you forget the dollar sign, the variable name will be converted to a string.
Con May be hard for programmers already used to imperative style to learn functional programming from Kotlin
Since Kotlin does not enforce any particular paradigms and is not purely functional, it can be pretty easy to fall back to imperative programming habits if a programmer comes from an imperative background.
Con The need for Java interoperability has forced some limitations
The need to make Kotlin interoperable with Java has caused some unintuitive limitations to the language design.