Hi,
I am not an expert in coding/programming at all; but I've heard from several sources that PHP is on its way out and that PHP, in a near future (2 years or so?), will not be well supported and that it will involve different security risks to use etc.

What is the Limesurvey community's thoughts about this?

Will the Limesurvey code eventually be changed to another programming language; and in that case which one might that be?

Thoughts about these questions are much appreciated.
Kind Regards,
Gorp

gorp wrote: but I've heard from several sources that PHP is on its way out and that PHP, in a near future (2 years or so?), will not be well supported and that it will involve different security risks to use etc.

What sources? There is a big gap between what developers want to use and what is getting deployed

The programming languages for server side web development have changed over time.
Before PHP perl was the lingua franca for web. PHP was born in 1995 and has changed over time.
We have seen ColdFusion, ASP.NET, Java etc. The last big impact on the web programming language scene was ruby on rails (as a framework for the language ruby, which was also born in 1995). Python and Go are also used for web-applications.

The advantage of PHP was never the language itself (you will always find a "better" concept implementation in other languages), but the deployment on a webserver itself. The ease of use and the stability of running a php application in combination with a webserver is still unmatched.

A programmer wants to code and develop. Running and maintaining a web-application is often a different thing.
So you need to put one eye on the programming languages itself and the other on the technical debt you will get into to run and maintain the web application.

I have seen the decline of Perl before.The decline starts slowly. Currently I don't see any signs of decline in PHP usage and support. For the next five years I see no need to think about switching from PHP to a different language. We don't know how Go and other languages evolve, but PHP has evolved too.

LimeSurvey won't switch to a different language in the next years. But let's see what the developers comments are.

I'm not the lead dev, but ask the same thing to wordpress, drupal, spip, phpBB, mybb, … … …
And do a simple search of anything related to webon github : look at Languages

When one leave PHP or are really replaced , i answer again …

PHP 5 will not be supported in the coming 2 years. It was time.
PHP 7 will be then the minimal requirement, even for LimeSurvey.

LouisGac wrote: PHP 5 will not be supported in the coming 2 years. It was time.
PHP 7 will be then the minimal requirement, even for LimeSurvey.

gorp didn't say PHP5, but all PHP version

PHP was the rising star a few years ago. Then suddenly Ruby on Rails was hip (haven't heard much about Ruby lately though).

I think Denis is right, with such important tools like Wordpress, Drupal, MediaWiki, Matomoto (the application formerly known as Piwik), etc. I don't see an end for PHP within the next 5-10 years. Might there be other applications that allow better, quicker, cheaper implementation of web apps? Sure, probably for many application there already are. However, keep in mind that it is not always the theoretically best technology that is successful, but the one that most people support. PHP has a huge base of applications/frameworks/examples and most important a abundant number of developers. So I don't think that PHP will die within the next couple of years.

But as Lous says, the versions of PHP supported will of course change. For a software like Limesurvey (or Wordpress or Drupal) it would propably mean that the application dies if you would have to change the whole code base to a new programming language. We have seen the results of trying to completely rewrite LS from core for a new release.