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by nsonha 1762 days ago
people actually upvote and answer to this question? Who would knows? It's 20 years.

20 years ago php was hot tech, php!!!

2 comments

Still hot, still pretty darn useful.

PHP is just too easy to hate, because of its massive popularity.

nah it's hated because it's such a crap language, I'm sure they piled enough stuff on it for 20y so now it's tolerable, but that doesn't change anything. PHP was originally "Hypertext Preprocessor", not even a programming language. You don't make a programming laguage as an after-thought.
> You don't make a programming laguage as an after-thought.

Why not?

I thought programming languages was just a tool, a means to an end. If that is the case, which I believe it is, it shouldn't really matter in which way it is created.

I would pick a tool that's grown out of actual needs over some guy thinking in the basement for 20 years any day of the week. Because the first one will solve problems and the second most likely won't.

because if you make a template engine and then oveload it with patches in order to make it behave like a general programming language, there is no way that can result in a cohesive thing that is effective for, say, financial transaction, which is something else completely different from what it was made for
And yet php pretty much power most ecommerce sites in existance. Sure maybe it isn't good enough for a banking systems, the NASA rovers, life supporting systems or similar stuff. But it certainly good enough for most web apps.
webapps are not just glorified sets of templates do you know that, there is a lot of domain logic in there, as well as concurrency, transaction etc.

Yes PHP is very popular, so is Tiktok, if anything it's an indication of stupidity.

20 years ago I picked python, with just a business and political science degree...
what would be the moral of your story? Learn a toy language at the time, it would become the de facto data science pl in 20 years?