[0] Used here as shorthand for “modern js driven development”
Nobody is reinventing PHP or RoR development. What is happening is the community taking all our favorite parts of these stacks and combining and implementing them in ways that facilitate a dev experience that we could only have dreamed of back in the PHP/RoR days.
- Senior dev that started off in the PHP and then RoR days
- Engineering Lead who got his start in PHP/ASP(pre .net) and loves the modern ecosystem despite its flaws
The evolution has been 2 steps forward but 1 step back. It’s how many complex systems evolve and it’s fine. Just because you see that some problems/solutions resemble what you saw 10 years ago doesn’t mean nothing was improved along the way.
PHP is an unsafe, slow by default (execution model - the language itself fast), hard to use well, clunky, limiting and bloated language that is kept together by duct tape and the incredible effort and ingenuity of it's open source community by educating developers and improving/cleaning up the language at full blast, unfortunately often by breaking backwards compatibility.
Whether JS (including Deno) is a good alternative or the right answer is up for debate. But people who try to mimic some of the benefits of PHP in the JS ecosystem are not doing so accidentally or because of lack of experience.