WordPress is 20 years old | Hacker News Reader

WordPress is 20 years old

wordpress.org

48 pointsmiohtama14 comments

And what an example of the "worse is better" theory the whole time! ;-)

I like to rag on WordPress as the next man but I do have to ask - why haven't you done any better?

If it's so easy, raise a few million bucks and outdo everyone. Surely?

Maybe your product is the next Stripe, where everyone currently in the market is so woefully inadequate that one company can come and clean up despite having mild expectations upon start-up. Or maybe, just maybe, you are missing the point, in regards to what they provide the current market and how they pivot towards the next!

(Obviously, I don't mean to call out anyone in particular, but Wordpress has a significant-enough marketshare that this defence is to-be-expected).

> why haven't you done any better?

Quite possibly the worst kind of discourse. Surely we can critique something without being accused of not building something better.

Not my intention; just a matter-of-fact thing. Why hasn't anyone done any better?

Network effect and market capture are a thing. Being dominant in a market is far from being evidence of having the best product, despite what market leader may have you believe.

I don't think anyone disrespects the commercial success, just the technical crappiness of the product

Yep. It has become ~50% of all websites and 30% of all ecommerce websites on the Internet because its worse.

I wonder what CS theorists have to tell about the class WP_Query which is ~4800 lines long.

https://github.com/WordPress/WordPress/blob/30c49f8df6dbdd9c...

Love Wordpress. Been using it for 12 years.

... and is pretty much single-handedly keeping PHP alive!

I've spent the last 10 years working for a succession of companies that used PHP yet have never worked on WordPress and I doubt I ever will.

If you're in the tech startup bubble it's easy to come to the conclusion that Python, Ruby and an assortment of minority interest languages with rabidly toxic fanbases rule the roost, but outside of that bubble PHP, C# and Java are quietly running the world.

Laravel is doing just as much to keep it alive.

PHP is still great for a lot of things, and as long as most hosting companies offer it pre-installed it will stay, even without WordPress.

If I want to create a quick script, I can just create a file directly on the server and see the result live, without having to compile anything or even restart the server. If I want to move it to a different server, I just copy-paste the contents of the file.

PHP is 80% of all websites on the Internet. WordPress is 50%. There is another 30% in between.

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