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Outside of HN, you'll find that PHP is by far the most popular server-side web application language. HN's kinda got a language hipster thing going where if you

Outside of HN, you'll find that PHP is by far the most popular server-side web application language. HN's kinda got a language hipster thing going where if you aren't using the latest language or framework then you're stale and old and irrelevant (headline: "Why you should be building your next ORM in Q#"; summary of thread: "I don't get why anyone uses anything else, my team of three has been very successful using Q# already"). The same thing happens about four times a year when COBOL is mentioned and someone realizes to their horror that the plastic card in their wallet works thanks to a language whose last major revision was in 1974. Perl still powers a lot of stuff. It fell behind PHP because PHP outpaced it for growth in web development. Nothing has outpaced PHP's growth yet, no matter how badly trend-addicted programmers want it to.

astrodust 9y ago
This is the fallacy. Perl never stopped growing in popularity, it's just that it was suddenly eclipsed by other languages that came out of nowhere and grew well beyond what it ever achieved. You're also falling victim to this same fallacy. Something did eclipse PHP. JavaScript.
- spdionis 9y ago
  On web backend? No, not really. Edit: Thank God!
  - astrodust 9y ago
    The back-end is getting thinner, the front-end is where all the business logic happens these days. So yeah, you might have a PHP back-end, but you also have a mountain of view logic in JavaScript (TypeScript, CoffeeScript, etc.) that utterly buries it. There's also Node.js which is catching on really fast because it fits that role of "JSON over REST/GraphQL provider" really well.
kbenson 9y ago
> Perl still powers a lot of stuff. It fell behind PHP because PHP outpaced it for growth in web development. Oh, I'm well aware. I'm a full time Perl developer, have been for a long time, and love the language. It's just interesting to see history repeat itself.

astrodust 9y ago

This is the fallacy. Perl never stopped growing in popularity, it's just that it was suddenly eclipsed by other languages that came out of nowhere and grew well beyond what it ever achieved. You're also falling victim to this same fallacy. Something did eclipse PHP. JavaScript.

spdionis 9y ago
On web backend? No, not really. Edit: Thank God!
- astrodust 9y ago
  The back-end is getting thinner, the front-end is where all the business logic happens these days. So yeah, you might have a PHP back-end, but you also have a mountain of view logic in JavaScript (TypeScript, CoffeeScript, etc.) that utterly buries it. There's also Node.js which is catching on really fast because it fits that role of "JSON over REST/GraphQL provider" really well.

kbenson 9y ago

> Perl still powers a lot of stuff. It fell behind PHP because PHP outpaced it for growth in web development. Oh, I'm well aware. I'm a full time Perl developer, have been for a long time, and love the language. It's just interesting to see history repeat itself.