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Comment by MissTake | Hacker News Reader

The announcement is high on promises, low on detail.

Wordpress is only 20 years old, and whilst it’s currently a viable company there’s no guarantee that they will be so in another 20 years.

As for 100 years? Sorry, not buying it (both figuratively and literally): we’ve already seen a huge change in technology that has already deprecated many a tech stack, and that change is only increasing in velocity.

$38K is a huge sum to put down when there’s zero actual proof they’ll even be able to sustain this for 25 years, let alone 100.

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$38k is a huge sum, but the problem is, it’s not enough. $1USD in 1920 inflated to roughly $15USD here in 2023. The same thing is going to happen, by design, between now and 2120.

This approximates to a pyramid scheme; or maybe, the US Social Security system is another great correlate. The only way it keeps going after even only ten years is raising prices for new customers subsidizing existing customers.

They could invest that money and use the returns to fund development.

That’s not going to happen, but such a small percentage of customers would sign up for this it’s effectively a non issue for the viability of the company.

Honestly, I think some regulations requiring some kind of independent trust should be required for any ‘lifetime’ subscriptions. Sorry we uhh renamed the product, your subscription is no longer valid. Sure, then refund my money.

I'm worried it might be too low as well, but we did a ton of modeling and tried to build in a quantum of safety for unknown unknowns. I expect this will cost more in the future.

Getting 38k now is very different from getting 38k over a 100years.

It’s worth exactly as much as it states.

Investing this money now might be beaten by inflation, competition or happenstance. But it could also grow the business and turn into orders of magnitude more value.

I agree however that Wordpress does not have such a long term prospect.

As of now, it’s both falling behind and moving into wrong directions at the same time from a technical perspective:

It’s increasingly more complex and unstable for non-technical users.

It’s bloated, full of gotchas, very hard/finicky to integrate with standard PHP tooling and has comically bad performance. So it deters developers.

It won’t go away anytime soon. But I very much doubt that it will be as relatively popular in even 10y as it is now.

I have a very high confidence that DNS survives.

And I would not bet against http, html and fundamental E/R databases. Http and html evolution can be managed by Wordpress inc. The database migrated.

I am worried that a cobol/VB style like decline of PHP is too much for the company. Because maintaining PHP is most likely very costly. But I might overrate this.

Surely it would be easier rewriting WP than proping up a dead language?

Tell that to FB

Except PHP isn’t dead - in fact it’s probably going through a renaissance.

The language and tooling have improved a lot over the last few years - to the point where starting a new CRUD web project using Laravel is a good default choice unless you have very special requirements.

I presume it's (Lavarel) a good default choice for someone active in PHP. Like many people, PHP was my first programming language, and I migrated away from it long ago. What's relevant for me is:

* How many new developers are picking up PHP

* How many remain using it after say 10 years

* How many end up contributing to its tooling and ecosystem

If those numbers are good in absolute terms, then I agree with you.

I'd consider Perl to be a dying language, not PHP. I'd also expect an active language's tooling to improve over the years, so that probably doesn't stand out too much for me (there's brilliant people working in various languages, in PHP I consdier Nikita Popov as one of them).

The fact that there are new and exciting things happening has nothing to do with whether the language is becoming less popular/relevant/adopted. Almost any index or ranking for programming languages you can find, TIOBE, stackoverflow survey and even Google Trends show that interest in php has been declining and not coming back. That is just the reality, and nobody is going to care if some part of the language or ecosystem improves.

Is that because its relative share is declining or because the absolute number is declining? The former indicates they are capturing as much of the new growth in devs, the latter there is an approaching problem.

Read my comment again.

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