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It seems like you're now arguing that PHP isn't a crumbling foundation -- a point that reasonable people could debate -- rather than that building atop crumbling foundations is by far the most successful ways to accomplish anything in computing, which was the claim I challenged.

Incidentally, my point about languages like C or operating systems like Windows was not that they are theoretically wonderful under the hood, merely that they provided a reliable foundation. C has been standardised for a long time and is widely portable. Code that was designed for early incarnations of Windows will often run with little modification even on today's systems because the essential underlying models and APIs have been diligently preserved over the years even as many other changes were going on around them.

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I'm curious just what definition you're using for "crumbling foundation". Is it that old software doesn't break on it, in which case PHP/HHVM/Hack isn't a crumbling foundation either - Facebook is built on it, and Facebook is clearly still running.

Or is it that maintenance is difficult and programmers will run into all sorts of ugly corner cases and features that are just grafted onto each other? Because those apply to C and C++ and Win32 and Google and basically every other large software system as well. That's the point the grandparent is making - if you look at pretty much any successful, evolving software system under the hood, you'll see a byzantine mess of complexity, and it's a wonder that it ever works.

I didn't have some some specific, technical definition in mind, but if I were to try and pin it down, perhaps in software terms it would be something like "a dependency that is unreliable in the long term".

Clearly this isn't an absolute scale. As our industry evolves and we develop more reliable ways to achieve our goals, something that we regarded as being a relatively stable foundation in the past may no longer be regarded as such in the future when our standards have risen. Moreover, what constitutes "long term" might vary wildly among different projects.

I suppose my basic objection to the original claim (that building atop crumbling foundations is by far the most successful way to accomplish anything in computing) is that significant achievements in computing tend not to happen overnight but rather to develop over time, and the more stable your foundations, the better chance your project has of developing far enough to achieve significant things.

If you define "crumbling foundations" as "a dependency that is unreliable in the long term", then your conclusion is circular. Of course no long-term products will be built on crumbling foundations, because if a technology stack has long-term successes then, by your definition, it is not a crumbling foundation.

I think the other posters are using a definition of "crumbling foundation" as "one which most engineers hate, which slows them down through excess complexity". And by that definition, almost all successful projects are built on crumbling foundations, because the fact that the project was successful leads you to add features to it, and adapt it in ways that the original architecture didn't anticipate. This process only ends when the software becomes so complex that all further attempts at modification fail, at which point everybody hates the codebase and it is, by pretty much any definition, a "crumbling foundation".

I think it's funny that this whole thread is based on the initial haphazard word choice of reikonomusha yet he is not even a participant in the debate.

If you define "crumbling foundations" as "a dependency that is unreliable in the long term", then your conclusion is circular.

Not at all. I'm arguing that in computing, worthwhile results often take time to achieve, and therefore that foundations that are likely to be around for longer will improve the chances of achieving such results. Alternatively, from the opposite point of view, the odds of achieving something worthwhile go down significantly if you have only a short time time to achieve it, as inevitably you will if you are building on foundations that aren't themselves going to be around for long (whatever we choose to call them).

hm interestingly, PHP still powers about 70% of the web! the web should have certainly crumbled by now ...

I'd disagree if you say PHP powers about 70% of the web. Web servers (and all other kinds of servers) are not written in PHP neither are protocols that drive the web. Operating systems are not written in it either. These (and many more) are what power the web, not web applications. Your definition of what "powers the web" is remarkablly wrong.

Facebook doesn't use web servers or operating systems written in PHP either, right? So if the language that web applications are written in isn't very important to the overall dependability of web applications, then it stands to reason that Facebook's choice of PHP for their web applications shouldn't be a problem either, right?

What point are you trying to make?

> What point are you trying to make?

I had this question in mind while reading your reply. What point are you trying to make with your comment? For my part I wanted to point out that it's unacceptable to say PHP powers 70% of the web. (Check my previous comment's parent.) It has nothing to do with Facebook. And I didn't allude to your inference that choice of language doesn't affect the overall dependability of web applications.

>I didn't have some some specific, technical definition in mind, but if I were to try and pin it down, perhaps in software terms it would be something like "a dependency that is unreliable in the long term"

In this case you are mostly hand-waving, and what you say amounts to "I don't like X language".

> It seems like you're now arguing that PHP isn't a crumbling foundation

I think you need to go back and read the message you replied to. He is not arguing that at all. He's pointing to a long range of other things that he is asserting are also crumbling foundations.

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