[mgkimsal]

I've worked at PHP shops - working on a PHP project for a consultancy right now - and there's 0 issues about 'shortcomings of the language'.

"past mistakes" are almost inevitable problems - I've been on both sides of this - creating things which likely caused someone else problems (learning to be better at tests and docs) - and inheriting problems created by someone see ( learning to demand better tests and docs from others when possible).

"past mistakes" have little to do with the language. Recently worked with a large Java codebase spanning back more than a decade. There's plenty of mistakes that have been made. And... there's plenty of 'language shortcomings' around Java too (go back to Java from 15 years ago, lots of shortcomings).

I was on a team that picked node for a project; the whole thing failed. Should I blame it on the language, or the people who made bad choices?

Perhaps the issue is mostly around people/teams that either aren't very good or more to the point don't have a structure in place to guide them and help them get better.

[indymike]

As I read this I'm upgrading an old Python 2.4 app to 3.8. It isn't just PHP.

[RedShift1]

Can you elaborate on the failed node project?

[mgkimsal]

Probably not much of interest. Small team of... 4-6 had mix of experience with php, java and .net (min 8-10 years of each, fwir). Someone wanted to learn node (of course... always the best reason to choose a star), and pushed that on others. I gave up fighting that. Then we needed to "micro service" the node code because... well... you know... we have to be on AWS and lambda because... scale. Funnily enough, 'testing' and 'testability' never seemed to enter in to the decision making equation.