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Comment by unobatbayar | Hacker News Reader

I like PHP and still use it today. But never in my life heard PHP is cool. Am I missing something?

Well, early 2000s it was definitely cool.

Using ASP and want to calculate an MD5? Oh, you need to pay an add-on for that. Want to send an email? Ditto.

Then there was PHP, with all included (and cheaper hosting, because Linux). I started working on a web shop and after a month ASP was legacy and PHP the new cool thing, together with MySQL instead of using... Access as "database" in ASP.

I was new to the world of software development in 2000 (in high school) but immediately loved PHP / MySQL. Made it easier for me to stand up websites for my two bands and integrate more dynamic and database-oriented features into those sites. And hand-wrote JS for things that at the time seemed cool (silly in retrospect hover effects).

It was the SQL part of the book that helped me build the SQL skillset that is an integral part of my day job.

Used a book similar to this one:

https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/professional-php4-programming_...

"Access as database in ASP"

haha. My first ever project as an intern in 2004 was exactly this.

They're making a rhetoric against JS style of development... Though I question what they mean by fake compilers...

transpilers*

A compiler translates code from a source language into a target language, normally targeting either physical hardware or some virtual machine. That is not what happens when "compiling" - or more accurately, "transpiling" [1] - JS-related software where what often feels like the JS-related dialect of the day (coffee-, mocha-, type-, tea-, frappucino-, latte-, pilzener-script) is converted into the resident JS dialect, discombobulated through some language feature thingamajig, transmogrified by some other package-combining gizmo (not the same gizmo as you used last week, that is now ancient technology, the new one is sooo much slower^Wbetter and has a snazzy content-less website to prove it), mixed and matched with a bunch of related packages many of which are marked with dire warning about bugs and staleness by the helpful package manager thing (which you had to update before even trying to proceed since the current version was no longer supported even though you're running version 12 and the box stated you needed at least version 9), uglified (as if it wasn't ugly enough already) and zipped up.

Doesn't all that make you long for the days of ./configure --prefix=/somewhere/sane && sudo install -d -o yourusername /somewhere/sane && make install? Just add empscripten to the tool chain and you can do web things with it, sort of...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-to-source_compiler

If people call something "cool" - that's actually a red flag for me.

That sounds fairly childish. Aside from the very obvious fact that you'll miss out on a lot of cool stuff, if you don't agree with the value judgements of your peers, the problem most likely resides with your choice of peers.

Red flag just means that you take a close and critical look - not that you automatically dismiss. And those "peers" are the people on the internet - f.x. blog authors.

How's that policy working out for you?

If I did that I'd have missed a hell of a lot of cool stuff in life haha

good, I'd say. I'm not waiting half an hour in a queue in front of a hipster ice cream parlor. when I go into nature I have a good chance of actually finding some peace b/c I do not go where Instagrammers take their selfies. I'm not torturing my soul on TikTok. I use choose technologies conservatively instead of by hype cycle. List goes on.

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