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Comment by donw | Hacker News Reader

> So a bus factor of zero would mean that the project is in jeopardy even if all the maintainers are alive.

So, PHP, then.

I suppose the downvotes may be justified due to your comment being pretty out-of-place, but, just to add some perspective: I'd like to remind everyone that PHP originally used strlen() as a hashing function: https://news-web.php.net/php.internals/70691

It is (or at least originally was) certainly not the pinnacle of good design.

I don't think it's fair to use this fact as a data point -- since that same message you've linked says "This was circa late 1994 when PHP was a tool just for my own personal use". PHP was released to the public 1995.

Eh, I think it is--the creator knew enough about programming to consider (and then actually implement!) storing the functions in a hash table, but I'd say that anyone who knows enough to do that would/should know perfectly well that strlen is a terrible choice for the actual hashing function.

Honestly, they probably are. But I figured that the occasional jibe or jest on HN is an absolute crapshoot.

> I'd like to remind everyone that PHP originally used strlen() as a hashing function: https://news-web.php.net/php.internals/70691

You speak of this as it should be something that is relevant for the state of PHP and the community that uses it to this day.

It is not. The community moved on, maybe it's time the haters did as well.

The other thing that's "funny" to me with PHP is that they are adding features a few years after everyone. Right now they're really big on OO when lots of people are slowly moving towards more FP features.

Is the trend of FP still going on? I'm not so sure, feels like it has somewhat slowed down compared to the hype about eight years ago.

There is somewhat a positive trend about immutability, but you don't need a FP language of FP features for that.

My guess which languages that is most popular here at HN, based on rough estimate of number of positive mentions, would be C, golang, rust & python, where neither is a FP language.

Edit: Maybe Erlang should be included in that list of popular HN languages, if that is the case then it is one out of five.

I think it is. Python added pattern matching, Java got records and pattern matching, C# too. React transitionned from class to hooks and is getting (or already got? I don't follow React too much) an effect system. Rust has a heavy FP influence. Go will have generics which may or may not open the door to some FP. From my understanding, the C landscape has a huge NIH and fragmentation bias, which means that ideas take a lot more time to penetrate.

Replacing everything with FP languages is not going to happen, but I think more and more people are coding in a "FP way" if that makes sense.

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