There's a whole industry of "IT professionals" who can't actually write code or do heavy sysadmin, but still can help small businesses with their internet needs

There's a whole industry of "IT professionals" who can't actually write code or do heavy sysadmin, but still can help small businesses with their internet needs. They can drag and drop wordpress/magento files in an FTP client, they can figure out the right plugins to meet the customer's need, and so on. Programmers like to look down on these people but they do great work that makes their customers happy. In fact, I bet they often deliver the same business value faster than the average programmer might. This entire industry wouldn't exist if PHP wasn't so easy to deploy and if there weren't great open source projects such as Wordpress and Magento particularly targeted at that way of working. It's not just "easy deployment", that's underselling PHP. It's "enabling an entire industry to exist" and also "letting small businesses pick a middle ground between hiring super expensive professional programmers or being limited to what Wix/Shopify have out of the box". Wix and Shopify and Webflow and so on are getting better and more powerful, but I'm convinced it's going to take a long time before they replaced PHP in powering the majority of the web. I agree with a sibling comment that Discourse could well have joined the ranks of WordPress and Magento by now, if only they'd chosen the right language.