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Comment by jpalomaki | Hacker News Reader

PHP was the Visual Basic 6 for web. People without proper training and theoretical knowledge just went and did stuff.

I think this is a sound analogy. I certainly recognize myself in the person without proper training and theoretical knowledge that just went and did stuff. Of course I changed and so did my tooling.

If it wasn't for how easy it was to get started and learn PHP back in 1998 when I started, I'm pretty sure I'd have gone to culinary school and became a chef instead of an software engineer.

I owe everything I have to Rasmus and his beautiful "shitty" language.

Empowered a generation to get stuff done.

I saw a webpage in the early 2000s that when I clicked something, it remembered the data on the next pages. Think simple counter. I checked out the site and it claimed to be using something called PHP which even free hosts of the time provided. How is this not enabling right?

I had a similar "simple counter" moment at a later date and the tech was AJAX. I am yet to have a similar moment after that. Perhaps WASM based interfaces? But it's not the same. Maybe I am not the same.

And leaving a steaming pile of unmaintainable shite being them.

Can we see your non-steaming pile of totally maintainable non-shit for comparison?

and made millions of dollars

It relocated wealth, but it did not create it.

There are lots of industries that are lucrative, but there's clearly no linear correlation to quality or societal benefit.

> did you make the pie bigger or did you take a bigger slice?

I think PHP did make the pie bigger, but there won't be shortage of companies who used PHP to only take a bigger slice.

billions

Considering Facebook is PHP (oh shut up Hack is PHP too) we could even say trillions.

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