Hacker News Reader

Most is 51%. If PHP was bad from 1994 to 2002, when "A Fractal of Bad Design" was written (18 years), and is OK now (assuming it got good immediately after that post was written 8 years ago), it has been bad for most of its existence by simple arithmetic.

View on HN

"A Fractal of Bad Design" was written in 2012. (looks like a typo on your part, since your math checks out)

Bad compared to what at the time?

What other tech compared to PHP at the time?

Java? Python?

The FA itself points readers to Python (with Flask, Pyramids, or Django), and also gives an offhand mention of Ruby + Rails and Perl + Catalyst. Java had also become a pretty reasonable language & environment by this time, and off-beat "let's build a better language on top of an existing runtime/ecosystem" languages like Clojure and F# were in full swing.

PHP was already very successful before Django or Rails even had their first release.

I remember trying to set up a Python Django web site for the first time around 2010 because Python seems like the better language and it was such a PITA compared to PHP's it-just-works nature.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com