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Comment by iamben | Hacker News Reader

I started writing my dissertation project in Perl CGI back in like 2001 or whatever it was. I moved to PHP pretty quickly when I realised I could do the same things in 5 lines that took 70 in Perl. I'd been making websites for about 6 years at that point and PHP just absolutely changed my life. It was, arguably, exactly like this post talks about CGI - put some script in a file, FTP to your host and you're good to go. Web development was simple and exciting - you could get a long way very quickly.

I was talking to a friend the other day who wants to learn some web dev for fun - he had no clue where to start because there's now SO much, so many 'best practice' posts, so much 'you must learn like this'. I know the world changes (and often for the better), but it was a magic time when you could get so far so quickly.

As an aside, it's why I have huge amounts of respect for people like Pieter Levels and his 'just get it done' approach to building things.

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To me PHP is still a great tool to do these sort of stuff. Not to do a whole application, it was not what it was designed for, but for simple stuff it's great!

And it's improved a lot PHP, nowadays it's not that bad language...

For web apps, PHP is still a great candidate. Check out Laravel or Symfony. It's not like the old days of PHP files mixed with procedural code. Although those were good days :)

I don't look at them for one reason, to me the great thing of PHP is the fact that is super easy and fast to add some dynamic generation to a mostly static website. By using a framework I can as well go to Next.js, for example.

The thing is that PHP is unbeatable for doing simple stuff, for example a simple contact form in a website, or a page where you have to book slots, and similar stuff like that, since you add a few PHP instruction to the site, upload it to a webserver, enable PHP that is super easy to install, and done. Need to do a modification? You can connect through SSH to the server and edit the PHP files in /var/www with vim, no need to compile, have a build system, restart services, nothing like that!

A lot of that goes away if you avoid Javascript/Node as your first ecosystem. The unnecessary complexity and cargo-culting there is off the charts. It's overwhelming even for the experienced engineers.

I got so jaded dealing with this JS nonsense just to get a simple front-end going for my pet project that I just said "screw it" and started using straight up ES6 in the browser. No libraries, no transpilers, no minifiers.

Perhaps we should start making tutorials that follow that idea from PHP: start with HTML, add an extension (e.g. .eex, .erb) and make it dynamic. This would lower the barrier for beginners.

By the way, the best HTML tutorial I found so far is Scrimba. The idea of having interactive videos where you can pause and edit the code is amazing.

You're right. And I'm sure they exist - just hard to find in a sea of "you'll get nowhere without knowing React" (or whatever) tutorials.

Equally, half the magic is ability to see it online quickly. Cheap, basically set up free web hosting and FTP made that very easy.

I _really_ tried to learn Perl back in the 90s, but PHP was what “unlocked” server-side scripting for me.

5 lines in PHP, 70 in Perl? You are joking, surely?

Exaggerating slightly, perhaps. But yeah, PHP was massively simpler.

Most PHP code I've seen is orders of magnitude more verbose than the Perl equivalent. Modern PHP is just pseudo-Java.

I'm nowhere near qualified enough to make a comment on that in 2023. But standing by my point about 20 years ago.

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