[KronisLV]

> I know engineering communities get exhausted by the library churn of the JS community, but I think it's a symptom of real success. A user base this large is going to create noise, but also produce real gems from time to time.

I wonder why this wasn't quite the case with something like PHP, then. It had (and in some respects still has) an enormous userbase, the technology had good enough performance, had batteries included for the most common use cases and was also relatively easy to get started with (being not too dissimilar to the CGI approach of having a request and a response, unlike the Java servlet mess at that time).

And yet, Apart from projects like WordPress, Symfony, Laravel and maybe a few others, it feels like it didn't ever get quite as popular, at least from a project/tooling perspective. I mean, XAMPP was nice and the entire LAMP stack worked well for typical configurations but things just kind of stalled there, maybe as other options came along.

[paulryanrogers]

PHP doesn't run in browsers. Nor does anything that's not vanilla JS. That's why everything else either transpires to JS or requires hoop jumps like WASM.

Until that changes JS will be the least worst option for folks who need unbounded browser interactivity.