3 ms·

The Silicon Valley / Hacker News Paradox: ~80%-90% of companies in this world are still using PHP, Perl, Bash, COBOL, Fortran, and C - all without fuzzers, auto

The Silicon Valley / Hacker News Paradox: ~80%-90% of companies in this world are still using PHP, Perl, Bash, COBOL, Fortran, and C - all without fuzzers, automatic testing, or CI/CD. There's also no shortage of Bootstrap, XML, jQuery, jQuery UI, and pre-HTML pages in this world. (Heck, macOS still ships XHTML 4.01 pages as part of the Screen Time system, right now.) You also seriously do not want to examine how much stuff which still relies on Internet Explorer is out there in corporate IT - there's a reason why Microsoft kept it for so long and still has IE Mode in Edge. We can't all be elitists and chronological snobs enjoying Rust, Ruby, and Node and bragging about how this is the only good or practical way to do things.

oldandboring 3y ago
Yup. There's also a ton of legacy Java and ASP/.NET stuff out there in my experience.
- waldrews 3y ago
  Can't really speak to Java, but ASP.Net, in its new open-source friendly incarnation, is perfectly viable for modern development (and there's still nothing quite like Blazor Server). They have a good story for integrating the new stuff (e.g. Razor Pages) with legacy code, interop and drivers for everything, the CLR is fast and multithreaded (cough Python cough), and F# is available for us language snobs. Just avoid the enterprise cruft and the Azure cost (and complexity) premium.
internetter 3y ago
I had a kneejerk reaction to this — no way 90% of companies use this! But you could be right. I mean, 43% of the web is wordpress
- gjsman-1000 3y ago
  43% of the web is WordPress. PHP, which WordPress is built on, is on somewhere between 70%-80% of websites in total. Websites you may not expect, like Wikipedia, Facebook (with a modified dialect), Etsy, and Slack have large PHP Codebases. As well as the 11th and 15th most visited websites in the world which are almost entirely PHP but, em, NSFW [1]. COBOL is still running every major bank, right now, as well as the IRS. Visa and MasterCard are still running on their IBM Z mainframes. Heck, not even DOS is gone. I've seen updated DOS programs running the registers at McDonalds in my area. Our midwestern regional hardware store brand (Menards) openly uses DOS programs at almost all of the employee kiosks for looking up information. Don't believe me? Here's a reddit thread about someone criticizing replacing System V at that hardware store branch (which covers MN, WI, and Iowa). https://www.reddit.com/r/menards/comments/t5czy3/system_vi/ https://www.reddit.com/r/menards/comments/t5czy3/system_vi/ and https://www.reddit.com/r/menards/comments/11lb6pf/there_is_a_secret_way_to_access_system_v_hehe/ https://www.reddit.com/r/menards/comments/11lb6pf/there_is_a... [1] Anyone who says PHP doesn't scale - point to, well, any porn site, as well as Wikipedia and Etsy, and you'll have proof it's completely BS.
  - paulryanrogers 3y ago
    Are you sure that's DOS and not just an ASCII terminal-based (or cursors) UI?
    - gjsman-1000 3y ago
      Technically, it runs in Windows now, but on DOSBox or another DOS-emulator. While I can't prove it, a web search suggests that, just as it looks, it's over 30 years old. https://www.reddit.com/r/menards/comments/rgc2ux/question_out_of_curiosity_does_anyone_know_how/?rdt=55955 https://www.reddit.com/r/menards/comments/rgc2ux/question_ou...
louwrentius 3y ago
I'm going to make the bet some critical functions that are foundational to our society (no matter where you live) are written in Visual Basic, most likely an Excel Macro.

oldandboring 3y ago

Yup. There's also a ton of legacy Java and ASP/.NET stuff out there in my experience.

waldrews 3y ago
Can't really speak to Java, but ASP.Net, in its new open-source friendly incarnation, is perfectly viable for modern development (and there's still nothing quite like Blazor Server). They have a good story for integrating the new stuff (e.g. Razor Pages) with legacy code, interop and drivers for everything, the CLR is fast and multithreaded (cough Python cough), and F# is available for us language snobs. Just avoid the enterprise cruft and the Azure cost (and complexity) premium.

internetter 3y ago

I had a kneejerk reaction to this — no way 90% of companies use this! But you could be right. I mean, 43% of the web is wordpress

gjsman-1000 3y ago
43% of the web is WordPress. PHP, which WordPress is built on, is on somewhere between 70%-80% of websites in total. Websites you may not expect, like Wikipedia, Facebook (with a modified dialect), Etsy, and Slack have large PHP Codebases. As well as the 11th and 15th most visited websites in the world which are almost entirely PHP but, em, NSFW [1]. COBOL is still running every major bank, right now, as well as the IRS. Visa and MasterCard are still running on their IBM Z mainframes. Heck, not even DOS is gone. I've seen updated DOS programs running the registers at McDonalds in my area. Our midwestern regional hardware store brand (Menards) openly uses DOS programs at almost all of the employee kiosks for looking up information. Don't believe me? Here's a reddit thread about someone criticizing replacing System V at that hardware store branch (which covers MN, WI, and Iowa). https://www.reddit.com/r/menards/comments/t5czy3/system_vi/ https://www.reddit.com/r/menards/comments/t5czy3/system_vi/ and https://www.reddit.com/r/menards/comments/11lb6pf/there_is_a_secret_way_to_access_system_v_hehe/ https://www.reddit.com/r/menards/comments/11lb6pf/there_is_a... [1] Anyone who says PHP doesn't scale - point to, well, any porn site, as well as Wikipedia and Etsy, and you'll have proof it's completely BS.
- paulryanrogers 3y ago
  Are you sure that's DOS and not just an ASCII terminal-based (or cursors) UI?
  - gjsman-1000 3y ago
    Technically, it runs in Windows now, but on DOSBox or another DOS-emulator. While I can't prove it, a web search suggests that, just as it looks, it's over 30 years old. https://www.reddit.com/r/menards/comments/rgc2ux/question_out_of_curiosity_does_anyone_know_how/?rdt=55955 https://www.reddit.com/r/menards/comments/rgc2ux/question_ou...

louwrentius 3y ago

I'm going to make the bet some critical functions that are foundational to our society (no matter where you live) are written in Visual Basic, most likely an Excel Macro.