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