5 ms·

The assumption that "better thing always wins" (for whatever definitions of better) is just plain wrong.

wpietri 5y ago
For sure. The longer somebody has been coding, the more examples they can list where the worse technology won out. Exhibit A here is the JS language itself. It became popular not because it was the best language, just the most ubiquitous one. You could read the 25 years since as trying to turn it into a solid language. Or look at the rise of PHP. It started out as a tool for making a Personal Home Page, which is a fine use case and was certainly a popular one in the mid/late 1990s. It eventually turned into the foundation for one of the world's largest companies. But nobody can argue it was a particularly good language. E.g. https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/ https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/ Same thing with Java, really. Bunch of interesting ideas, some of which worked out and some didn't. Even at launch a lot of the things that have turned out to be problems were criticized. They say that Java is the new COBOL, and that seems pretty fair to me. I could go on all day. The most popular technologies are not always the best. That applies to movies and music and pretty much everything. And personally, I've accepted it. It's part of how the world works. The trick for those of us who like "better" things is to figure out how to get them to become mainstream.
mohanmcgeek 5y ago
When all dimensions are considered, the better thing is the thing that wins. All the counter examples in other replies focus on one aspect of a piece of tech that was bad while completely ignoring the rest. Php might have been bad as a language but for its time, it was easier and more productive than the alternative (J2EE): the better thing won until it was supplanted by something better.
- regularfry 5y ago
  That is an error in the other direction: focusing only on a single good aspect of a piece of tech. PHP wasn't up against J2EE in that first wave, it displaced perl and cgi-bin. And the only thing it had going for it was easier deployment. Arguably first-class templating too, but I don't think that was the killer feature, and really perl wasn't that far behind. Perl had better OS support, a massive ecosystem that PHP didn't catch up with for about 15 years, and a community that actually cared about code quality. And it was renowned as a "getting stuff done" high-productivity language. The easier deployment story for PHP3 meant you saw massive expansion at the bottom of the market as cheap webhosts were able to offer very locked-down accounts for peanuts, which meant a generation of developers came along whose only experience was with PHP. They didn't have anything to compare to and nobody was really offering them anything else at anything like the same scale. The virtualisation revolution hadn't happened yet, so these were all shared accounts on physical boxes, and they couldn't install their own stuff either. It's just not reasonable to say PHP was "better" except in a very limited, and largely accidental sense. It just so happened that that one advantage was enough to catapult it into first place.

For sure. The longer somebody has been coding, the more examples they can list where the worse technology won out. Exhibit A here is the JS language itself. It became popular not because it was the best language, just the most ubiquitous one. You could read the 25 years since as trying to turn it into a solid language. Or look at the rise of PHP. It started out as a tool for making a Personal Home Page, which is a fine use case and was certainly a popular one in the mid/late 1990s. It eventually turned into the foundation for one of the world's largest companies. But nobody can argue it was a particularly good language. E.g. https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/ https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/ Same thing with Java, really. Bunch of interesting ideas, some of which worked out and some didn't. Even at launch a lot of the things that have turned out to be problems were criticized. They say that Java is the new COBOL, and that seems pretty fair to me. I could go on all day. The most popular technologies are not always the best. That applies to movies and music and pretty much everything. And personally, I've accepted it. It's part of how the world works. The trick for those of us who like "better" things is to figure out how to get them to become mainstream.

mohanmcgeek 5y ago

When all dimensions are considered, the better thing is the thing that wins. All the counter examples in other replies focus on one aspect of a piece of tech that was bad while completely ignoring the rest. Php might have been bad as a language but for its time, it was easier and more productive than the alternative (J2EE): the better thing won until it was supplanted by something better.

regularfry 5y ago
That is an error in the other direction: focusing only on a single good aspect of a piece of tech. PHP wasn't up against J2EE in that first wave, it displaced perl and cgi-bin. And the only thing it had going for it was easier deployment. Arguably first-class templating too, but I don't think that was the killer feature, and really perl wasn't that far behind. Perl had better OS support, a massive ecosystem that PHP didn't catch up with for about 15 years, and a community that actually cared about code quality. And it was renowned as a "getting stuff done" high-productivity language. The easier deployment story for PHP3 meant you saw massive expansion at the bottom of the market as cheap webhosts were able to offer very locked-down accounts for peanuts, which meant a generation of developers came along whose only experience was with PHP. They didn't have anything to compare to and nobody was really offering them anything else at anything like the same scale. The virtualisation revolution hadn't happened yet, so these were all shared accounts on physical boxes, and they couldn't install their own stuff either. It's just not reasonable to say PHP was "better" except in a very limited, and largely accidental sense. It just so happened that that one advantage was enough to catapult it into first place.