[dgb23]

HN doesn't talk about it often but PHP is still the workhorse of the web. And that is for good reason. It's fast, stateless, easy to use and not just batteries included, you also get the charger, the repair kit, repair parts and adapters for seemingly every use case.

That said, it's clunky in many ways and (very) slowly losing it's dominance. It's community clings on class based, mutable OO (while even languages like Java expand in other directions). And there are thousands of little gotchas, weirdness-es and limitations that make using the language un-fun and sometimes unproductive/limiting. For newcomers it is a nightmare to fall into all these traps for the first time.

A true PHP competitor however would need to be incredibly accessible and re-imagine a lot of things. I think it would need to fully embrace modern HTTP, HTML, CSS and browser APIs. Deno is seems to partially lean on that direction for example, but that is "just" the server side so it doesn't count. Isomorphic development is a big deal. There is Imba which is also an interesting attempt. Modern languages like Clojure and Kotlin provide the capabilities but not the development accessibility and defaults (personally a huge Clojure fan though).

[tl]

> and (very) slowly losing it's dominance

Is it losing dominance?

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/09/php-maintains-an-eno...

[dgb23]

Haven't seen those numbers yet thank you. I was basing the above more on tiobe index, google trends and gauging the frontier of web development, which includes tooling, modern libraries.

Much of the effort in the latter part, innovation, products, tooling and marketing at the web frontier seems to more strongly focus on JS/TS/Node/V8/serverless/WASM. When I started with web dev, PHP was the de-facto standard language for small web-shops (Ruby was on the rise, Node on the horizon). I don't think that is true for the next generation of web developers.

[eatYourFood]

What did Java move to exactly?

[dgb23]

There have been more constructs that are leaner and less traditional class based OO since a while, such as lamdas, records, more expressions, higher order functions.