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by vec 4074 days ago
I don't think you're going to see a serious competitor to Wordpress in anything but PHP for a long time. The core target audience for a CMS is content creators and designers without strong compsci backgrounds. The things that make it hackable (trivial to modify in-place, extremely forgiving of type errors, no internal sandboxing, etc.) are the very things that make it attractive to non-developers.

Nothing is going to dethrone Wordpress unless it's at least as easy to cargo cult, and anything that does will more or less by definition annoy experienced developers more than what it replaced.

2 comments

The beauty (which can also be seen as a disadvantage) is that writing Go does not exactly require comp sci skills. I suspect that Go is even simpler than modern PHP as a language.

You can of course go full comp sci implementing clever algorithms in Go, but you could do that in PHP, too, and none of content creators is usually interested in this.

Go requires knowledge of types, which already puts its cognitive complexity ahead of PHP for the typical content creator.
Go's types can be explained as some sort of templates for values (especially record types). Any CMS user knows about templates.
Are data types that complex a concept to grasp? When I started programming in VB I don't remember it being.
Data types aren't the bottleneck, the deployment model is. Editing a Go application requires the following steps:

  1.  Edit the project's files.
  2.  Open the (scary and alienating) command line.
  3.  Run `go build` and hope it works right.
  4.  Find and stop the old running server process and start the new version
Oh, and you'd better hope step 3 goes smoothly, because a tiny mistake anywhere in your application will cause this weird thing called a "compiler error" that means that the entire thing will break. Editing a Wordpress site, on the other hand, looks like this:

  1.  Edit the project's files.
  2.  There is no step 2.
As developers, we're comfortable with the first workflow. We happily accept the added complexity because of all the other nice things it gives us and because we're probably using other tools like version control that end up making our experience much more uniform between the two. But to a user whose primary experience is with editing Word documents there is a huge jump there.
Maybe not, but it definitely requires you to sit down and learn & understand what's going on, often longer than most of these people want to spend on one particular subject that may not be part of their regular job.
Prone to hacking because of PHP or just bad programming habits and poor plugins?