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Comment by VHRanger | Hacker News Reader

PHP being awful annoys me so much more than javascript being awful.

At least for the latter the use became mostly unintentional. For PHP, the problem is that it came about at just the right time to be picked up by WordPress and Facebook, hence encrusting itself in most of the web we see.

I dislike WordPress the same way I came to dislike Visual Studio or any other monstrosity. It's a slow, massive, lumbering mess but it's also by the most mature tool for the job it does.

There's no reason to pick up PHP for a new project. Except, I guess if you're just doing simple CRUD and PHP is what you know.

Languages don't matter that much for simple CRUD apps and PHP is a sub par, annoying, inconsistent language that will get the job done.

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> For PHP, the problem is that it came about at just the right time to be picked up by WordPress and Facebook, hence encrusting itself in most of the web we see.

That's backwards in my opinion. PHP was successful among non-CS-people, and those people started building things they were interested in. That gave PHP the initial success (especially on the web, were plenty of people didn't have a CS background unlike in enterprise software), which lead to people like Larry Sanger and Jimbo Wales using PHP to build their first version of Wikipedia. And it also lead to PHP being the go to thing for websites, pushing aside Perl, which meant that when Zuckerberg wanted to build a site for fun to rate coeds, PHP was a natural choice. Quick to build, easy to deploy, not a lot to worry about.

I'd be surprised if somebody back then planned to invest a huge sum of money and create some giant system and chose PHP. But PHP just being there, highly available, and people using it for all kinds of random stuff and then some of those things taking off and PHP just remaining at their core because of inertia, that's not surprising imho.

The first version of Wikipedia used usemod, which is Perl.

The "phase II" version in PHP was written by Magnus Manske (who is indeed a non-CS-person).

Oh, I was not aware of that, thank you.

wordpress would be a slow, massive, lumbering mess in any language. It happens to be in PHP but you would get same result if it was built in python or javascript. Any dynamic language in the wrong hands can lead to that same result, at least PHP managed to introduce stricter typing and so on while other languages have arrived way later (Javascript must use TypeScript and Python is going through a slow and painful migration out of Python2)

I'm currently on a project building A CQRS system in PHP (not the first time) . I have no idea what you are basing this on.

he's basing it on PHP 10-20 years ago, just like the article explains. :P

PHP via HHVM + Laravel is a still top choice for new projects imo.

Why with HHVM? PHP7 is pretty fast, I believe the fasted non-compiled language there is.

good to know, i hadn't fully dug in yet.

What was the point in this comment? You basically just complained about a bunch of random stuff. I can assure you that you're way more bent up about this than any PHP dev would be from reading this comment.

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