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Yeah PHP was the first time web applications really "clicked" for me because there were not a hundred layers of abstractions between the html page and the application code. I was new to programming, and I took a look at J2EE and its literal million lines of code pet store that was supposed to be the shining example of how to do J2EE right, and I was like wtf is all of this... PHP though it was so easy to just make a page that gets some stuff from a DB, does some stuff with it, and outputs the result. I didn't need to read a 500 page book to get started with it.

In the end, PHP wasn't great, but around 2000 it was a great intro to building things on the web.

by icedchai16 hours ago|

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Having lived through that era, J2EE was ultimately a disaster. I remember an "entity bean" (terrible name for a class that manages data persistence) requiring multiple java files and at least a couple XML configuration files. It was complete madness. It was slow to build, slow to deploy, slow to run.

by icedchai21 hours ago|

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PHP's other advantage is deployment: it's simple. In the 2000's, I used to work at an enterprise Java shop but also did PHP freelance work. The amount of bullshit you had to go through to deploy a Java app on JBoss was insane.

by chasd0015 hours ago|

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> None of these astronautic patterns like you see in Spring, the dependency hell that comes with node, or whatever the cool kids are using right now.

Verbosity of a language/framework is meaningless now. Pick a language or platform that makes it as hard as possible to write insecure code, no matter the tedium, and let a coding agent bang away on the keyboard for you.

by GuB-4210 hours ago|

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Verbosity and architectural complexity matter to a coding agent. LLMs have limited context windows, and the less verbose the code, the more you can fit in there.

Complex architectures are even worse, again due to limited context. LLMs work well at the function level but have trouble seeing the "big picture". I would argue that working with agents is all about managing context and things like skills, subagents and the practice of writing plans are just a way to optimize context use. If you could stuff your entire code base in there with full attention, it would be much easier, but the costs of doing this would be prohibitive.

by gbuk201320 hours ago|

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I have a soft spot for PHP but these days I would reach for https://pocketbase.io/ by default for a crud app. It’s really great. :)

by jimbokun19 hours ago|

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Yes, I never totally understood why the PHP execution model wasn't copied by frameworks in other dynamic languages like Ruby and Python.

PHP is hard to beat for development velocity. Edit a file, refresh a page in your browser, see the results.

by evilduck19 hours ago|

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You could always write CGI scripts in Ruby and Python, but other than catering to the PHP-infected, why would you want to?

by win311fwg18 hours ago|

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Ish. I remember when the earliest versions of Rails used a CGI runner. Development didn't carry on long before application startup time became so horrendously slow that it was no longer viable. That is when it started to become popular to add a server in the application.

Now that people are back to writing their applications in languages that aren't as slow as Ruby they've, in many cases, taken the server back out of their application and have returned to the CGI model again; what is often marketed as "serverless".