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Comment by techcrucher123 | Hacker News Reader

So my question is, is PHP on the right side of history or not?

Purely server-side tech is less sensitive to this kind of swing because you control the execution environment. Likewise for open-source software, and software based on open, widely used technologies, protocols and specifications - for example, it's unlikely that HTTP is going away in the time it takes for a startup to outgrow its "startup" status.

All of this applies to PHP, so I can't see it being killed off anytime soon, regardless of technical merit. (I wouldn't choose it for a bunch of other reasons, but those are subjective)

> is PHP on the right side of history or not?

PHP has been and will be on the wrong side for the very long time ahead.

If you have companies like Facebook using it... surely you'd think PHP is on the right path, no?

That's not really saying anything. Facebook picked PHP in 2004 and is now stuck with it. They have a huge code base in it.

But there are a lot of indications they are moving away from it in all places they can. They still use it for front end work, but even there they have been one of the biggest innovators coming out with the HipHop PHP compiler.

Behind that they also came up with the Thrift RPC framework specifically so that the rest of their code and logic could be written in many other languages including Java, Python and Erlang.

Facebook is a lot more than PHP and they've pushed PHP innovation a lot too. I find their use of PHP as no clear indication PHP is the right or wrong choice. It's just the choice they made 7 years ago and are living with

http://www.quora.com/Why-hasn-t-Facebook-migrated-away-from-... has some insider insight.

Facebook have also built a Haskell tool to generate/update their PHP now as well, https://github.com/facebook/lex-pass

I'm not sure that is a good example. I have no insider knowledge of Facebook so I may not be correct, but as I understand it, they switched to using their own interpreter and translate the code to C++ for production. The only remaining ties being the syntax and at least some of the API.

If the author of this article had the dependencies and resources of Facebook, building their own Flex-based environment independent of Adobe is an option they may have considered as well.

In this case, it was more cost effective to just rewrite the application in another language. Facebook found it cheaper to rewrite the environment. But the end result of breaking ties with a third party appears to be the same.

PHP was on the right side of history in history, in the 1990s when it was a new product. Today? It has a lot of competition and is dropping in popularity, although it is still good enough for many purposes. PHP is open source so it will be around for a while.

Agreed. 10 years ago, PHP (like Java) was a great bet, despite its flaws. A startup building a fresh technology stack and picking PHP today is standing on the wrong side of history, though. PHP can't be abandoned in the same way that Flex can, but it can become irrelevant in the way that Perl has done.

(not trying to bash Perl, but it's hardly the most relevant language to web development today)

> (not trying to bash Perl, but it's hardly the most relevant language to web development today)

What on earth does that /mean/? What would make a language relevant? Would it be a huge community writing and releasing code every day? (http://search.cpan.org/recent) Would it be lots of conferences? (http://lanyrd.com/topics/perl/past/) Would it be sexy startups using it? (http://duckduckgo.com/, http://selectablemedia.com/)

So...?

Possibly he means percentage of new projects using it, or maybe something like its influence on the future, which is related. It's hard to define, but you sort of know it when you see it.

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