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Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

PHP is tolerable if you NEED to use it. If you don't absolutely need to use it, why bother?

(I spent a few solid years of my career writing PHP professionally, so this isn't just a vapid hot take)

Serious question. The only reason I can think of for choosing PHP is if your target deployment environment is going to be shared/commodity hosting. WP is king here and will continue to be king for this reason. Ghost is not working becuase it isn't LAMP stack.

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Why exactly bother with anything else than PHP?

PHP isn't an application server. It's tightly coupled to the request/response cycle. There are things you can do to sorta get a longer running environment but for the most part you are loading and tearing down everything for every single request.

Contrast this to Python, Ruby, Node, Go, really any other platform where you tend to model applications with an application server that is long running. In a scenario like this, your application is running all the time and doesn't boot up on every request.

For that matter MS Asp Classic works fine too which is my favorite.

I can only offer my reason: I don't know it.

Why bother eating anything except cold gruel?

My understanding is almost all PHP dev is done because it’s improving a legacy system or it’s integrating into a legacy system, or the first engineer could just move faster in PHP because of personal reasons.

I'm mostly Frontend developer recently so I haven't been much up to date with Backend technologies. If I need a CMS for my frontend, what technology(-ies) can I use?

I'd go with Ruby on Rails if it's mostly CRUD operations. You'll be very quick to get something up and running to power your frontend.

You could also use some hosted services like https://firebase.google.com / https://www.contentful.com but that depends on your use case and if you want to be dependent on someone in return for being a bit faster.

You could use Wagtail (built on Django) in headless mode. Drupal also supports headless mode.

Hugo and Gatsby come to mind. They are based of tech like react, go, and graphQL.

Those aren't CMS...

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