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Stupid Question, not an insult: Why is kbin written in PHP? (kbin.social)

submitted 1 year ago by EthicalAI@kbin.social to c/kbinMeta@kbin.social

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Is PHP still a relevant language in today's day and age? I know a LOT of languages and it just never occurred to me to learn this one, because anyone I've ever been aware of writing a backend these days would either choose Node or one of several compiled languages. Lemmy uses Rust for it's backend which is highly desireable, many people would have used Golang in the backend world if they desired performance and compilation, otherwise I don't know why you wouldn't just use Typescript. Makes it hard to contribute to IMO.

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[–] czech@no.faux.moe 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think Ernest has mentioned that he used PHP for quick prototyping and eventually plans to rebuild with something else. If you look through his post history you'll find something.

[–] EthicalAI@kbin.social 10 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Yeah that never happens lol

[–] tal@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago

Reddit was originally built in Lisp -- Paul Graham, an early backer, is super-rabid about Lisp. They eventually reimplemented it in Python.

I do agree that it's not the norm, though.

[–] HidingCat@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago

Don't know why you're getting downvoted; anyone who's ever done a project of some kind (whether or not it's programming-related) knows that anything doing a rebuild/remake/re-anything has a high chance of not happening. xD

[–] majkeli@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I’m currently involved in a rewrite! One of very few in 20 years of dev work. We prototyped our front end in node/js and we’re rewriting in React. We’re largely keeping the express backend, though.

[–] baggachipz@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

we prototyped our frontend in node/js

Uh… wut

[–] majkeli@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yep. People make bad decisions frequently. The rewrite was a way of keeping the newer devs on the project (like me) from revolting.

[–] baggachipz@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But node doesn't run in the browser. So was it all SSR?

[–] majkeli@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

Mainly tooling and a few ill conceived React components that never really fit anywhere and are now polluting our new build process until we are able to rewrite them.

[–] mrbigmouth502@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

As they say, there's nothing more permanent than a temporary fix.