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Comment by motogpjimbo | Hacker News Reader

I'd be interested to know what you think PHP got wrong with respect to web development? The majority of the web is running on PHP to this day, so at least in terms of popularity it seems people don't feel this way generally. Furthermore, if one were philosophically-minded, it could be argued that PHP's "shared nothing/one thread per page" execution model is the very quintessence of HTTP.

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It‘s also the essence of "serverless" so that model seems almost prescient.

Except Erlang (and nowadays Elixir as well) has that for 30+ years already and it's done much better -- one green thread per request, and you can have 200,000+ of them at the same time on some fairly modest hosts, without any of them stealing run time from the others (as much as the hardware allows, of course).

PHP's "prescient" model demanded one OS process per request which is frankly absurd and I don't get how anyone views PHP in serious light because of this single fact alone.

Now think about how many companies/products need the power of Erlang vs PHP where PHP has more tooling, better ecosystem and far more available talent to choose from. Just because Erlang can perform better doesn't mean it is the right tool for the job. Performance is one aspect and PHP is good enough for lot of use cases while it has tons of other advantages that Erlang doesn't.

Not performance per se. It's a much more robust model of work that in addition is sipping hardware resources more efficiently (so DoS attacks from one user to all others are hard).

"How many companies need X" is not a discussion, it's an exchange of opinions and won't ever go anywhere, so I refuse to start it.

I was merely responding to the claim that PHP had "prescient" ideas. It didn't.

I’m curious what metric you’re using to determine that a majority of the web is running on PHP.

Surveys generally indicate that of sites where it is possible to determine the language, somewhere between 70% and 80% of them are running PHP. Of course, that figure will include a lot of WordPress sites.

What percentage of websites is it possible to determine the language? My guess is not many. Your metric self-selects for recognizing PHP sites because of Wordpress.

What alternative language do you propose? Not that asking for a source is unreasonable, but you seem to doubt that PHP has majority market share. Do you suppose that Node is more popular? Rails? Go? Flask?

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