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I don't know how this has happened, but at some point in the future I must invent a time machine, go back to 2005, and submit a post to HN that arrives today. T

I don't know how this has happened, but at some point in the future I must invent a time machine, go back to 2005, and submit a post to HN that arrives today. That's exciting.

Trufa 4y ago
I must be going crazy, the amount of posts I’ve been seeing recommending PHP on HN lately is making me doubt my sanity. I am no latest tech only hipster kid, but making a fast no bloat website this day with modern JS stack is pretty darn easy. For me it’s hard to evaluate cause I’ve been doing it for years but I’ve recently thought it to a couple of people with no coding experience and they got it. Seriously, people are terribly close minded about the JS ecosystem and the fame is well deserved maybe but seriously if you have some minimum guidance of what to stick to it’s one of the best and easiest stacks around.
- conductr 4y ago
  I've observing on HN what seems to be a trend back to self hosting and that essentially is going to lead to the simplicity of the good ole LAMP stack. I see what seems like a lot of fatigue with all the frameworks, dependencies, containers, etc. It was like those things had initial excitement but then longer term were more of a burden/risk/hindrance.
- onion2k 4y ago
  I love to dunk on PHP as much as the next dev, but if you're recommending JS instead then you're not really thinking about it enough. Pretty much all the issues with PHP apply equally to JS. The cool kids dunk on both of them.
- netol 4y ago
  > I am no latest tech only hipster kid, but making a fast no bloat website this day with modern JS stack is pretty darn easy. Are you talking about static websites, or API-driven? Can you put an example?
NorwegianDude 4y ago
There is nothing wrong with PHP for websites. I'm fact, PHP is probably the best option for most people(that's a bold statement). It does many things better than other languages. It's not without reason that PHP is the most used language for websites. There is of course situations where PHP isn't a good solution. I would prefer to use something else if something like websocket was important or if performance was critical. PHP today has about as much in common with PHP from 2005 as today's javascript has in common with javascript from 2005. Languages change.
- xigoi 4y ago
  > It does many things better than other languages. Such as? (Aside from inconsistency, it's indeed unbeatable at that)
  - netol 4y ago
    he he… I'm not the OP, and I'm not knowledgeable enough in programming languages to answer this question. But I also would be curious to know what the other languages are doing better, regarding backend website development (apart from consistency, which I don't argue is important). PHP may be very inconsistent, but its syntax is also very stable. You don't need to spend hours rewriting your application to use the latest PHP version. I'm not sure if it may have been a good idea to have a "Python 3"-style release, maybe.
  - NorwegianDude 4y ago
    Templating is built in. It doesn't maintain state between requests, and that is a perfect match for HTTP. It's easy and fast to deploy. You don't need to restart things or think about reusing ports to update without downtime. It's easy to sandbox, making hosting very cheap compared to most other languages. It's basically "serverless" with really good startup times. It has better performance than most other interpreted languages. It has support for many functions that many other languages would require a dependency for. Development speed quite fast as a result of the large amount of included things. You can to some degree decide if you want to use strict types, or just ignore it. It has a large ecosystem with multiple great, feature rich, and battle tested frameworks. It's has very good backwards compatibility, and it's easy to upgrade large code bases to newer version. It's documentation is the gold standard according to many. While it's definetly not one of the coolest or most fun languages, it's definitely one of the greatest for the web. Doesn't PHP run something like 75-80 % of all websites today? Clearly it's doing something much better than others.

I don't know how this has happened, but at some point in the future I must invent a time machine, go back to 2005, and submit a post to HN that arrives today. That's exciting.

Trufa 4y ago

I must be going crazy, the amount of posts I’ve been seeing recommending PHP on HN lately is making me doubt my sanity. I am no latest tech only hipster kid, but making a fast no bloat website this day with modern JS stack is pretty darn easy. For me it’s hard to evaluate cause I’ve been doing it for years but I’ve recently thought it to a couple of people with no coding experience and they got it. Seriously, people are terribly close minded about the JS ecosystem and the fame is well deserved maybe but seriously if you have some minimum guidance of what to stick to it’s one of the best and easiest stacks around.

conductr 4y ago
I've observing on HN what seems to be a trend back to self hosting and that essentially is going to lead to the simplicity of the good ole LAMP stack. I see what seems like a lot of fatigue with all the frameworks, dependencies, containers, etc. It was like those things had initial excitement but then longer term were more of a burden/risk/hindrance.
onion2k 4y ago
I love to dunk on PHP as much as the next dev, but if you're recommending JS instead then you're not really thinking about it enough. Pretty much all the issues with PHP apply equally to JS. The cool kids dunk on both of them.
netol 4y ago
> I am no latest tech only hipster kid, but making a fast no bloat website this day with modern JS stack is pretty darn easy. Are you talking about static websites, or API-driven? Can you put an example?

NorwegianDude 4y ago

There is nothing wrong with PHP for websites. I'm fact, PHP is probably the best option for most people(that's a bold statement). It does many things better than other languages. It's not without reason that PHP is the most used language for websites. There is of course situations where PHP isn't a good solution. I would prefer to use something else if something like websocket was important or if performance was critical. PHP today has about as much in common with PHP from 2005 as today's javascript has in common with javascript from 2005. Languages change.

xigoi 4y ago
> It does many things better than other languages. Such as? (Aside from inconsistency, it's indeed unbeatable at that)
- netol 4y ago
  he he… I'm not the OP, and I'm not knowledgeable enough in programming languages to answer this question. But I also would be curious to know what the other languages are doing better, regarding backend website development (apart from consistency, which I don't argue is important). PHP may be very inconsistent, but its syntax is also very stable. You don't need to spend hours rewriting your application to use the latest PHP version. I'm not sure if it may have been a good idea to have a "Python 3"-style release, maybe.
- NorwegianDude 4y ago
  Templating is built in. It doesn't maintain state between requests, and that is a perfect match for HTTP. It's easy and fast to deploy. You don't need to restart things or think about reusing ports to update without downtime. It's easy to sandbox, making hosting very cheap compared to most other languages. It's basically "serverless" with really good startup times. It has better performance than most other interpreted languages. It has support for many functions that many other languages would require a dependency for. Development speed quite fast as a result of the large amount of included things. You can to some degree decide if you want to use strict types, or just ignore it. It has a large ecosystem with multiple great, feature rich, and battle tested frameworks. It's has very good backwards compatibility, and it's easy to upgrade large code bases to newer version. It's documentation is the gold standard according to many. While it's definetly not one of the coolest or most fun languages, it's definitely one of the greatest for the web. Doesn't PHP run something like 75-80 % of all websites today? Clearly it's doing something much better than others.