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Comment by jawns | Hacker News Reader

Not a perfect analogy, but PHP was on its way out for a while and probably would have gone all the way out -- if it had not been for one very high-profile company that essentially made it usable at scale. And the reason it did so was because even though PHP had little cachet, it was easy to hire PHP devs.

Similarly, there are now a lot of things you can achieve with vanilla JS (or even vanilla CSS) that you used to only be able to achieve with jQuery, and frameworks like React and Angular are viewed more favorably. But lots of devs of a certain age know jQuery, even if they don't currently use it, and there is something to be said for familiarity. Honestly, if I needed to whip something up in a day, I would probably use jQuery rather than a heavier framework.

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> And the reason it did so was because even though PHP had little cachet, it was easy to hire PHP devs.

Really not true. There is no part of the hiring process at FB that focuses on trying to find PHP (or now — Hack) developers. The main impetus was that there was an existing, large, PHP code base.

Disclaimer: former FB engineer

Obviously not now. But the choice to start with PHP and not quickly migrate away did have something to do with the fact that it was easy to find people familiar with it, and easy for people not familiar with it to pick it up.

I would argue that Facebook's work had little impact on the "scalability" of PHP. I don't see people adopting HipHop (HHVM) in huge numbers. The problem with PHP was it's standards body wasn't doing a good job of keeping the language consistent and it lacked a package manager where Ruby, Python and Node all had solid standards bodies and it was driven by having package management.

With Composer that changed and it appears now they are doing a much better job of standards and changes to the language.

With that said, it's not a concurrent system. It's blocking and that's a problem for modern Web languages.

I do think PHP growth is on the way down... but slowly.

Actually HHVM had a huge impact. Having competition is always a good thing. It forced the devs to go into overdrive and improve the product.

What came out of it was PHP 7 and the gap closed significantly. There were even rumblings about a PHP JIT complier. So I would say the impact was a good one.

As for PHP growth, what's there to replace it? Golang, Exlir, Node, Crystal, Ruby, Python? They all have their own pros and cons.

With laravel being a great framework and much easier for developers to use rather than symfony. I would say the future of PHP has never looked better.

Even if most people don't use HHVM, I claim it increases use because it allays fears about what happens if your project / company does need scale.

>it's not a concurrent system. It's blocking and that's a problem for modern Web languages.

PHP has had async for a while (https://reactphp.org/) and more recently an extension (https://www.swoole.co.uk/) had brought PHP async to equal or better performance to NodeJS (https://gist.github.com/nkt/e49289321c744155484c)

I recently started working with NodeJS more intensively (heavy lifting for dozens of microservices for complex app/data). While there are many nice features NodeJS has, most people don't understand what PHP can do. In my opinion PHP is superior for many backend application and the "snob factor" is one of the reasons it's not more known beyond wordpress.

Wordpress is a big reason a lot of people will still use PHP. Also Wikimedia to some extent.

So to complete the thought, at which age should we expect developers to know nothing about new technologies? Also, are you involved in the hiring process at your company?

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