It’s no secret among web developers and programmers in general: PHP doesn’t have the simplest reputation. Despite still being one among the foremost used languages to create web applications; over the years PHP has managed to urge itself a reputation of messy codebases, inexperienced developers, not secure code, an incompatible core library, and whatnot.

Although many of the arguments against PHP still stand today, there is also a bright side. Developers can write clean and maintainable, rapid and consistent applications in PHP.

There are numerous reasons that everyone who wants to work with websites should learn these fundamentals. The latest PHP version is currently 8.0.0, this release marks the latest major release of the PHP language. Besides it, PHP 8 also brings a pleasant set of new features like the JIT compiler, union types, attributes and more. Have look at all new features:

The Null safe Operator:

If you’re well-known with the null coalescing operator you are already familiar with its shortcomings.

$startDate = $booking->getStartDate();

$dateAsString = $startDate ? $startDate->asDateTimeString() : null;

With the adding up of the null safe operator, we can now have null coalescing-like behaviour on methods!$dateAsString = $booking->getStartDate()?->asDateTimeString();

Not only one there are many more new updates are there in the new release. The release of PHP 8.0.0 removed old and obsolete code and paved the way for new features and performance upgrades in the future. In addition, PHP is expected to gain additional performance optimizations soon. Although having some compatibility breaks with previous releases, most of the troubles are easy to resolve.