> PHP was a joke language from the start.... Cue the PHP fans telling me that "it's good now".

First, I am not a PHP fan, but I will absolutely stick up for the "its good now".

Yes, absolutely no debate the old PHP 4.x/5.x was shocking. However to give PHP their due, they absolutely did make serious efforts in 7.x/8.x. They deserve due recognition for that.

Unfortunately lots of people – I'm guessing you're one of them – still have battle-scars from 4.x/5.x and they think (incorrectly) that 7.x/8.x is "more of the same".

Second "joke language", well, cast your mind back to what else was available at the time... ColdFusion, CGI, ASPX ... it was not exactly a beautiful world back then.

Sure, to borrow your terminology, the Java fans will be along soon to tell us all how awesome Java is for the web. But many of us still bear battle-scars of the horrors of Java stacktraces, messing around with incomprehensible XML config files, Java's penchant for eating RAM for breakfast, and generally trying to figure out why the hell Tomcat is not working (again !).

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sneak 8 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

CVE-2026-109618 is evidence that it is absolutely not "good now". To make a pro-PHP argument the week that PHP's shortcomings just cost half the internet millions of dollars of lost time panic-patching an RCE is... an interesting choice.

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mitchitized 39 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> ColdFusion, CGI, ASPX ... it was not exactly a beautiful world back then.

Pffft. VRML is the whole game, baby! Once everyone runs out and gets an SGI oxygen, Nobody is going to use freaking web browsers ever again. I mean, HTML, what a joke.

	▲	tinco 33 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Also, ASPX (so ASP.Net) was a vastly superior technology to PHP. It was my first love, and I ditched it for Ruby on Rails, but ASP.Net was really good. Especially when you ran it on Linux using Mono.
	▲	thorin 27 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I remember VRML being a possible PhD topic for me in 1997, I think that was about the last I heard of it! The other option I was actually offered was in machine learning and categorisation, but I avoid it as it was obviously a dead end lol.

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DocTomoe 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I remember when that exact line of argument was made about '3/4 was silly, but they're putting a real effort into 5'

	▲	fabioborellini an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Also "3 was silly, they got 4 done right". Although that was more connected to the performance improvements through Zend Engine than language sanity or robustness, at the time.

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hansvm 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Wait a second, in very recent years the major Java projects I touched were still messing around with incomprehensible XML config files. Has that actually changed in some part of the industry?

	▲	drdec an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		You can use annotations to get rid of a lot of XML in server side Java. See Spring Boot for example.
	▲	mrkeen an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Yes, when I started getting into Spring(Boot?) in 2013-14 I was complaining about the annotation magic that you needed to sprinkle around the code, so that you could have a Java project take a long time to start up and fall over. The response at the time was that it was so much better than the old XML way that you "had" to do. So that kind of XML hasn't been needed for 10+ years. Unless you count the XML dependency management with Maven, which isn't too bad.
	▲	traceroute66 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> Has that actually changed in some part of the industry? I suspect the only thing that's changed is that Oracle now charge you for the pleasure. ;) More seriously though, its been a long time since I've touched Java, but I suspect the only thing that's changed is that its all hidden in magical kubernetes containers these days.