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The language that appeals to the masses with low barrier to entry in a niche always wins the popularity contest in that domain. I attribute it to herd mentality

The language that appeals to the masses with low barrier to entry in a niche always wins the popularity contest in that domain. I attribute it to herd mentality; assuming skill has a standard distribution, the average developer herd gets a massive head start. You can see the idiot friendly language eclipse in popularity in other domains too even though "better" alternatives exist: - elegant general purpose: python over ruby - web: php over python/rails - SQL databases: MySQL over Postgres - NoSQL: MongoDB over CouchDB/Postgres Go's just the first mass appeal language in the concurrency performance domain and it just opened the door to a lot of developers who before wouldn't dare play in the space.

makapuf 9y ago
Some of the dumber but more popular solutions here are just older ones. And please refrain from starting unsubstantiated flamewars. What's next, editors: emacs over vi ? Colors: black over white ?
Can_Not 9y ago
PHP has some unique design considerations that make it better suited for web. PHP's main significant weaknesses for that domain would be the lack of a strong type system, lack of strong event based server ecosystem (what reactphp does, nodejs, golang, etc.), and it's slower than Java. It has multiple popular long supported rails alternatives. Python and Ruby have nothing over PHP for web development. PHP has the absolute best first class support for isolated http request handling, live updating only challenged by erlang, standard library designed entirely around webdev, great tooling for building c extensions, widespread cpanel hosting, and composer (pip is garbage compared to composer). So while you might like ruby/python because it's prettier or because PHP 4 was awful, the idea that one of them is a better web language is totally laughable. If you asked me to define a language better than PHP for web applications, I would have you a long list not even considering python and ruby.

makapuf 9y ago

Some of the dumber but more popular solutions here are just older ones. And please refrain from starting unsubstantiated flamewars. What's next, editors: emacs over vi ? Colors: black over white ?

Can_Not 9y ago

PHP has some unique design considerations that make it better suited for web. PHP's main significant weaknesses for that domain would be the lack of a strong type system, lack of strong event based server ecosystem (what reactphp does, nodejs, golang, etc.), and it's slower than Java. It has multiple popular long supported rails alternatives. Python and Ruby have nothing over PHP for web development. PHP has the absolute best first class support for isolated http request handling, live updating only challenged by erlang, standard library designed entirely around webdev, great tooling for building c extensions, widespread cpanel hosting, and composer (pip is garbage compared to composer). So while you might like ruby/python because it's prettier or because PHP 4 was awful, the idea that one of them is a better web language is totally laughable. If you asked me to define a language better than PHP for web applications, I would have you a long list not even considering python and ruby.