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A fair question is if they successful thanks to PHP or inspite of PHP.

Yahoo!, too, is a heavy PHP user.

They're slowly moving to node and java for quite some time. I interviewed there a few months ago and they drilled me on java stuff.

Neither of those would even remotely qualify is accomplishments in computing. But they also are terrible examples. Facebook isn't using PHP anymore, that's what this discussion is all about. Wikimedia is terrible, and wikipedia is almost exclusively static content being served by squid.

What are we discussing? Are we discussing about the tool or the things made from tools?

Its like trolling a raw cast iron hammer used to build a furniture factory and then saying the whole factory is entirely useless just because some invented a stainless steel hammer.

We're discussing both. The original question posed was something like "what amazing stuff has been built on crumbling foundations", and the response was "wikipedia". I don't necessarily agree with the sentiment of the question, but wikipedia is not a good example of amazing technology.