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2007 was 17 years ago, and it was another world. This time 17 years ago, the iPhone had not been released. Facebook was still new and hot, the first big operati
by toyg 3y ago
2007 was 17 years ago, and it was another world. This time 17 years ago, the iPhone had not been released. Facebook was still new and hot, the first big operation to be unashamedly built on PHP (!). GitHub didn't exist, opensource happened on mailing lists, Sourceforge, private Subversion repos.
It was definitely another world. I do agree that maintainership issues were already there, but I think they were smaller in number. Between the explosion of projects and the explosion of users, they are now on a different scale.
- rrdharan 3y agoMySpace, Yahoo! Mail, eBay and probably other large scale operations were all built on PHP long before Facebook and I don’t think any of them were particularly ashamed about it.
- toyg 3y agoI doubt eBay was originally built with PHP - when it was founded in 1995, the very first PHP version had been available for barely 3 months. I expect the original EBay was mostly Perl, which was the standard at the time. The others I don't know, but MySpace was not a particularly big operation. Before WordPress, most sites started as PHP at some point were expected to migrate to something else, because maintainability of PHP3/4 projects was a big challenge (hence the "shame"). Facebook was the first company that simply refused to do that, and focused on improving PHP instead.
- manquer 3y agoPHP was a popular stack at that time ? Wikipedia and Wordpress existed and were very popular and unashamedly PHP. What PHP lacked and Ruby had was rails like framework , the team from 37signals singlehandedly shifted the momentum out of PHP with their work on rails.