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This is an arrogant and immature type of thing to write. This is programming, not high school cool-kids club. PHP is a wonderful tool that was mostly responsibl

This is an arrogant and immature type of thing to write. This is programming, not high school cool-kids club. PHP is a wonderful tool that was mostly responsible for the dynamic web. Before it became popular, the web was mostly static HTML with an occasional CGI form, probably written in something like Perl, mostly just for emailing the webmaster. Maybe some small amount of JavaScript for something like rollover effects, but that's about it. It's kind of like the situation today with the resurgence of JavaScript. One day the kids of the next decade will be posting snarky attitude basically calling JavaScript users retards because they don't use the cool-kids' PepoCOde. Lame. PHP is still excellent technology, and very relevant still for building dynamic server-side websites. It used to be that people using JavaScript were made fun of for being "scripters", not "programmers". Everyone knows JavaScript is the language of Mort. Only Franken Elvis uses C.

acdha 11y ago
I agree with rejecting the elitist framing but … the web was decidedly not mostly static before PHP came along. Perl had many frameworks (e.g. PHP started as one), as did conventional languages like Java, Python, with deep server integration possible using things like mod_perl. There were also a bunch of web-specific dynamic platforms like Cold Fusion and classic ASP / me-too JSP. Finally, there was server-side JavaScript as one of Netscape's offerings in the mid-90s. What PHP added was primarily ease of use with the ability to deploy code simply by creating a single file, suitable for mass deployment at ISPs in the era where everyone used shared servers, and the combination of comparative ease of use with enough performance to do serious projects. Cold Fusion was also easy but didn't support things like persistent connections (read: order of magnitude slower) and the core language was very, very slow and also quite limited and buggy. You could find much faster options if you wanted to build, debug and deploy a conventional language like C++ or Java but the cost and risk was so much higher that this was unfavorable unless you really needed performance. EDIT: if you want a snapshot of what the 90s web was like, http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/ http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/ was quite popular in the day. I know at least one well-known business which still has a revenue-generating website built in TCL, too…
- mei0Iesh 11y ago
  If you were a corporate/academic programmer at the time, or lucky enthusiast, you had access to more things. Most commoner folk stepping up to a local ISP shell from BBS did not have access to all kinds of goodies. There also was less formal education available, so even when technologies existed, without mainstream marketing and documentation, it simply wasn't accessible to the masses. Cold Fusion was proprietary software from Macromedia you had to pay for, as I recall. Some admins were restrictive, and didn't even like you compiling your own stuff. PHP really was responsible for the dynamic web. It had enough community support to enable newbies to wrap their head around the mind-boggling shift to dynamic server-side websites, and it became commonly provided with cheap or free shared hosting. A big reason why it succeeded was because it was possible for people who only understood HTML to transition, since a PHP file could be nothing but HTML to start with, and people used a lot of templating rather than start from scratch with code that echoed out HTML. With things like Perl, it was not an HTML templating script first, and so that made it less streamlined and simple for the task of making websites.
  - acdha 11y ago
    Again, PHP made it better and easier but you aren't going to convince me that my direct experience didn't exist simply by repeating the same assertion. Before PHP became widespread in the very late 90s there were many options for dynamic apps. I worked with ISPs which offered CGI or SSI even on cheap / free plans. Sure, it was ugly but a ton of people got what they needed done by going over to Matt's Script Archive and finding something they could hammer into shape. Before antique PHP apps, the security cliché was formmail.pl & a slew of long-forgotten guestbook / forum scripts. I'm not saying that PHP didn't help considerably, only that it was very far from first. I remember having to make the case for using PHP 2 or 3 instead of many of those alternatives and it was based on cost and convenience, not the ability to do anything new.
    - mei0Iesh 11y ago
      I didn't say first, I said responsible, and first doesn't really matter. Albert Einstein's e=mc^2 wasn't first, it was already published by someone else written slightly differently. But he made it popular, and that's what counts for widespread adoption and propagation of tech. You sound like an older hardcore nerd. You're from a different planet. What was going on in your circles was not at all a reflection of the web on a whole. Most people didn't even use ISPs in those times, they were on private systems like AOL. The dynamic web we know today, where almost every website is not static HTML, is because the majority of people making any little website had access to PHP, and free tutorials to learn.
oblio 11y ago
Umm... no. I was talking about the subset of devs which are just chugging along without much thought put into the craft of programming. Which includes me sometimes, as well as many PHP developers. But not all of them. Go search internet forums: "how i script PHP mail?" folks won't use the latest best practices. And there were dynamic webpages before PHP, PHP just gave a ton more people access to them by easy installation, configuration and most importantly, development/feedback cycle.

acdha 11y ago

I agree with rejecting the elitist framing but … the web was decidedly not mostly static before PHP came along. Perl had many frameworks (e.g. PHP started as one), as did conventional languages like Java, Python, with deep server integration possible using things like mod_perl. There were also a bunch of web-specific dynamic platforms like Cold Fusion and classic ASP / me-too JSP. Finally, there was server-side JavaScript as one of Netscape's offerings in the mid-90s. What PHP added was primarily ease of use with the ability to deploy code simply by creating a single file, suitable for mass deployment at ISPs in the era where everyone used shared servers, and the combination of comparative ease of use with enough performance to do serious projects. Cold Fusion was also easy but didn't support things like persistent connections (read: order of magnitude slower) and the core language was very, very slow and also quite limited and buggy. You could find much faster options if you wanted to build, debug and deploy a conventional language like C++ or Java but the cost and risk was so much higher that this was unfavorable unless you really needed performance. EDIT: if you want a snapshot of what the 90s web was like, http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/ http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/ was quite popular in the day. I know at least one well-known business which still has a revenue-generating website built in TCL, too…

mei0Iesh 11y ago
If you were a corporate/academic programmer at the time, or lucky enthusiast, you had access to more things. Most commoner folk stepping up to a local ISP shell from BBS did not have access to all kinds of goodies. There also was less formal education available, so even when technologies existed, without mainstream marketing and documentation, it simply wasn't accessible to the masses. Cold Fusion was proprietary software from Macromedia you had to pay for, as I recall. Some admins were restrictive, and didn't even like you compiling your own stuff. PHP really was responsible for the dynamic web. It had enough community support to enable newbies to wrap their head around the mind-boggling shift to dynamic server-side websites, and it became commonly provided with cheap or free shared hosting. A big reason why it succeeded was because it was possible for people who only understood HTML to transition, since a PHP file could be nothing but HTML to start with, and people used a lot of templating rather than start from scratch with code that echoed out HTML. With things like Perl, it was not an HTML templating script first, and so that made it less streamlined and simple for the task of making websites.
- acdha 11y ago
  Again, PHP made it better and easier but you aren't going to convince me that my direct experience didn't exist simply by repeating the same assertion. Before PHP became widespread in the very late 90s there were many options for dynamic apps. I worked with ISPs which offered CGI or SSI even on cheap / free plans. Sure, it was ugly but a ton of people got what they needed done by going over to Matt's Script Archive and finding something they could hammer into shape. Before antique PHP apps, the security cliché was formmail.pl & a slew of long-forgotten guestbook / forum scripts. I'm not saying that PHP didn't help considerably, only that it was very far from first. I remember having to make the case for using PHP 2 or 3 instead of many of those alternatives and it was based on cost and convenience, not the ability to do anything new.
  - mei0Iesh 11y ago
    I didn't say first, I said responsible, and first doesn't really matter. Albert Einstein's e=mc^2 wasn't first, it was already published by someone else written slightly differently. But he made it popular, and that's what counts for widespread adoption and propagation of tech. You sound like an older hardcore nerd. You're from a different planet. What was going on in your circles was not at all a reflection of the web on a whole. Most people didn't even use ISPs in those times, they were on private systems like AOL. The dynamic web we know today, where almost every website is not static HTML, is because the majority of people making any little website had access to PHP, and free tutorials to learn.

oblio 11y ago

Umm... no. I was talking about the subset of devs which are just chugging along without much thought put into the craft of programming. Which includes me sometimes, as well as many PHP developers. But not all of them. Go search internet forums: "how i script PHP mail?" folks won't use the latest best practices. And there were dynamic webpages before PHP, PHP just gave a ton more people access to them by easy installation, configuration and most importantly, development/feedback cycle.