[No PHPun Intended] A Brief History of Web Development
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Java is a better fit. It hasn't fallen in popularity the way PHP has. But, I'm not convinced that serious backend services mostly use Java. It's one of the languages used, sure. But, I don't know if it beats C/C++ or Go. Apache's C. Nginx is C. Kubernetes is Go. Docker is Go.
I think Java has a niche with certain kinds of business logic applications, and those are pretty common. I would guess that in a typical set of interactions with a Google product, or a Meta product, or an AWS product, some parts of the traffic will be handled by services written in Java. But, others will be C/C++ or Go. There will probably also be some parts of the process that are PHP or Ruby or Python, and a lot of Javascript.
I can only speak for what I see in the central European market, big banks like Unicredit (literally primefaces frontend), Erste group is running Java, basically all government services are Java.
Java is by far the dominant language on the job market in terms of number of open positions and salary.
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Nah, i'd say java has been better than PHP overall
That's also 30 years old, old man!
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Yep, PHP is turning 30 this year! Wondering if "PHP is still relevant?" Ever since we have been hearing that PHP is dead. It was “dead” 10 years ago, 5 years ago, and “is dead” today. But somehow - it isn’t. Anyway... happy birthday!
PHP will never die. As long as code is written there will be PHP developers there to claim it's good now.
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Most developers are not going to create the next kubernetes. For me it is usually down to earth integrations. Take this file from s3, send as email and sftp here. Create API to proxy another API. Take messages from Kafka, put on rabbitMQ. Save messages from rabbitMQ to database.
I think Java is very strong with libraries. Especially with Spring Boot and camel. I don't really see it as niche but more of a plain boring peanut butter sandwich. Boring. Unexciting. But works.
I am however trying to convince my boss to allow kotlin. Which has access to all the java libraries
Most developers are also not going to create a "serious backend service". Most are making a random website, or chaining together a few "business logic" items. I think we're just talking about different levels of "serious backend service". Like, if you mean someone making a website for the biggest industrial machinery company in the fortune 500, but it's all B2B stuff and so it handles at most hundreds of QPS, then I think you'll find a lot of Java there. I just think that for the biggest B2C companies in the world that handle hundreds of thousands of QPS, it's not exclusively Java.
I'm not trying to say Java is bad or anything. It's just that it has a few quirks (like garbage collection) that start to matter when you're getting eye-watering levels of traffic. So, for the most serious of the "serious backend services" I think you see Java, but you also sometimes see C/C++ and Go.
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There are still Amish and Mennonite communities who use horse-drawn wagons and farm implements their whole lives.
Not really meant to be an argument to your point, just interesting to know.
It's definitely cool to see when you get into Western Pennsylvania, for example.
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Tell me you haven't looked at php in 15 years without telling me you haven't looked at php in 15 years
I just looked, that was the basis of my comment. It's bad, in particular that "Laravel" thing was awful.
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Everyone in this thread: PHP sucks because it was bad when I last used it 20 years ago.
Dangit. That's me too, I just saw your comment before posting one myself
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IDK, I like Django/DRF
FastAPI ftw, fight me! Lol jk Django is cool and useful and serves a different need, quite well from what I understand.
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Yep, PHP is turning 30 this year! Wondering if "PHP is still relevant?" Ever since we have been hearing that PHP is dead. It was “dead” 10 years ago, 5 years ago, and “is dead” today. But somehow - it isn’t. Anyway... happy birthday!
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Ah yes, the language that picked strlen as the hash function for its hashtables.
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I'm complete opposite. I feel ruby is a far more mature solution compared to what enterprises are using; node, python, (new hot language here).
Most enterprises use Java. Having built many large apps with Ruby and the JVM ecosystem, there’s a reason the JVM is chosen. Same for C#.
Yes, Ruby is way way more mature than node and Python, but most orgs aren’t building backends with those, or if they do they pretty quickly learn why they shouldn’t (been at two orgs that were moving off of node and python).
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Webassembly frameworks.
Blazor! But only because I'm a dotnet guy professionally.
Yew? I'm not good enough with Rust to have tried it.
Wasm cannot modify the DOM iirc
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W-what? Did you used js as backend? How was performance?
Happens a lot - my (quite small) shop was using NestJS for backends and my boss is way more experienced and wise than me. I unintentionally caused us to switch over to Python, which probably sounds as silly as JS to many, but - we deliver dope shit, on time and on budget
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Ah yes, the language that picked strlen as the hash function for its hashtables.
Can you elaborate on this?
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Or TSP (trisodium phosphate) - which you can't even make websites with, but it's great for cleaning oil spots off the driveway.
Well, now, that's useful, but we shouldn't fail to mention good ol HCl, muriatic acid colloquially for this purpose, also great for cleaning oil stains from a driveway!
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Can you elaborate on this?
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Webassembly frameworks.
Blazor! But only because I'm a dotnet guy professionally.
Yew? I'm not good enough with Rust to have tried it.
Dotnet professionally and using lemmy.ml socially is hilarious to me and (sincerely) entirely consistent. Makes perfect sense, I just find it funny. (I'm not being sarcastic or attacking you, might not be clear lol)
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Let's be honest though. The early PHP versions were absolute dog shit. And the definition of how not to design a programming language. That said, that never stopped anyone in web development from using it apparently. No clue what modern PHP looks like, apparently it's better now.
I've never heard of a programming language that people don't consider shit
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There really isn’t a language that has completely disappeared.
How about that shit where a "program" was a bunch of patch cables plugged into various sockets? That shit is gone, man.
Just for the sake of being contrary, I know that there are still machines running on punch cards in some army-related places, where not changing anything is mandatory. I wouldn't be surprised if hot-wiring is also still there somewhere, it's just mostly running without changes.
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That's also 30 years old, old man!
A language usually doesn't become worse with time, at least if the devs do a good job at improving it.
There are cases of new languages that looked better but didn't become mainstream because the ecosystem requires time to grow (and adoption, which creates a vicious cycle because adoption requires ecosystem to already be there)
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W-what? Did you used js as backend? How was performance?
It's very rare that the backend language significantly affects performance. In 99% of apps you could have the most optimized backend written directly in machine language, and you'd just shave off milliseconds.
That's because in web development most of the latency comes from i/o (network requests, database access, file access), not from computation being slow.
