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by bigiain 429 days ago
It's 1999 or 2000, and "proper" web developers, who wrote Perl (as God intended) or possibly C (if they were contributors to the Apache project), started to notice the trend of Graphic Designers over-reaching from their place as html jockeys, and running whole dynamic websites using some abomination called PHP.

History repeats itself...

2 comments

I still use PHP, is your point that everyone will happily use NextJS in 10 years? I doubt it.
The proper comparison is with Laravel. How will Laravel fare vs Next in 10 years? Hard to say, they could both be equally legacy by then.
I really hope not, because I really hate how JS has fucked the internet. Just look at how shit the experience on www.reddit.com vs old.reddit.com is. Old uses a lot of JS now, which has made the experience a touch worse, but it still mostly serves a static HTML page. It loads quickly, renders quickly, and lets me do useful preference based things on my end.

I hate what JS has done to the internet, and I think it plays a heavy hand in the internets enshitification.

> started to notice the trend of Graphic Designers over-reaching from their place as html jockeys, and running whole dynamic websites using some abomination called PHP.

Your point is they shouldn't?

Nah, my point was that people who ignored the incumbent "wisdom" in the late 90's, actually took over the web.

As much as some "technical" people deride PHP and the sort of self taught developers that were using it back then, WordPress pretty much is "the web" if you exclude Facebook and other global scale centralised web platforms, and the bits of the non FAANG et al owned web that aren't WordPress are very likely to be PHP too. Hell, even Facebook might still count as a PHP site.

In 30 years time, it won't be the most elegant or pure language or framework choices that dominate, it'll be the language/frameworks that people who don't care about elegance or purity end up using to get their idea onto the internet. If I had to guess, it'll likely be LLM written Python - deeply influenced and full of idioms from publicly available 2018-2024 era open source Python code that the AI grifters hoovered up and trained their initial models on.