> PHP only exists today because of legacies being maintained
> people compare it to languages like Rust or Go since they consider those are "innovative"
PHP is getting old enough for developers today to be unaware of the history of web development. If you don't know the history, then you haven't seen the twists and turns it has taken. If you don't know the twists and turns, then you don't see how everything from the past relates to the state of the present.
Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of PHP is that the ecosystem so thoroughly solved a certain approach of web development that the rest of the world could move on to try these other ideas (which are of questionable effectiveness.) There's only so many web frameworks, content management systems and general web development libraries that you can build before you start to realize what waste of time it is to keep reinventing the wheel. PHP has an ecosystem which is still strong (and growing) because there's no need to recreate what PHP has done so well.
Wordpress as an example is not going to be replaced. You can't replace Wordpress by building something in a different language. The code base represents mind blowing knowledge which has gone into solving such problems which have nothing to do with a specific programming language. Nobody cares that you can recreate some basic thing with the new shiny. The programming language isn't the problem.
Now Wordpress is possibly reinventing the CMS with Gutenberg (like it or not) and it's not the programming language which is making it possible or hindering. PHP is a great platform to build on.
As your system grows, then your problems change. The tools required to tackle those problems change as well. This is true of everything. You can't manage a Google the same way that you manage a 2 pizza team. To get to that scale, the systems need to change many times over. PHP solved a wide problem, but it's not perfect and it's not one size fits all. Go is great at solving other problems, and it's a generalist when applied to the web domain. It's not a good comparison.
We haven't even started on the business side of decision making. If I want a web presence, this thread is doing nothing for me. I'm just going to fire up Wordpress and move to the next step. Or Laravel if I want a fast prototype, etc.
Seeing how important this history has been in my own area of expertise makes me think I better start hitting the history books which would be important for my other areas of life. If you don't know your history, then you're handicapped when discussing the present.
Just to interject — WordPress’ origins are indeed PHP, but most modern WordPress development, especially Gutenberg — is really JavaScript. And that’s the reality, for better or worse. Many longtime WP devs are struggling with this reality.
In fact, I would posit that many of the complaints about PHP come from WordPress’s widespread usage and its slowness to adopt modern PHP features (and to be fair, I do understand that slowness. If you power such a huge portion of the web, making breaking changes to things that could impact tens of millions of sites on the name of modernization is difficult to reconcile). If/when PHP becomes just a legacy part of WordPress, it’ll be interesting to see what impact (of any) that has on the languages perception.
> but most modern WordPress development, especially Gutenberg — is really JavaScript
As are probably most other discussed ecosystems in this thread. Most people doing Go for web development are probably writing JS heavy front-ends which interact with API endpoints on the Go driven back-end.
> If/when PHP becomes just a legacy part of WordPress, it’ll be interesting to see what impact (of any) that has on the languages perception.
What would it be replaced with and why?
Gutenberg still interacts with a PHP back-end. There will always (until web drastically changes) be a need for something to do the API handling. Would Automattic push the community to build that back-end using Go? Node?
> people compare it to languages like Rust or Go since they consider those are "innovative"
PHP is getting old enough for developers today to be unaware of the history of web development. If you don't know the history, then you haven't seen the twists and turns it has taken. If you don't know the twists and turns, then you don't see how everything from the past relates to the state of the present.
Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of PHP is that the ecosystem so thoroughly solved a certain approach of web development that the rest of the world could move on to try these other ideas (which are of questionable effectiveness.) There's only so many web frameworks, content management systems and general web development libraries that you can build before you start to realize what waste of time it is to keep reinventing the wheel. PHP has an ecosystem which is still strong (and growing) because there's no need to recreate what PHP has done so well.
Wordpress as an example is not going to be replaced. You can't replace Wordpress by building something in a different language. The code base represents mind blowing knowledge which has gone into solving such problems which have nothing to do with a specific programming language. Nobody cares that you can recreate some basic thing with the new shiny. The programming language isn't the problem.
Now Wordpress is possibly reinventing the CMS with Gutenberg (like it or not) and it's not the programming language which is making it possible or hindering. PHP is a great platform to build on.
As your system grows, then your problems change. The tools required to tackle those problems change as well. This is true of everything. You can't manage a Google the same way that you manage a 2 pizza team. To get to that scale, the systems need to change many times over. PHP solved a wide problem, but it's not perfect and it's not one size fits all. Go is great at solving other problems, and it's a generalist when applied to the web domain. It's not a good comparison.
We haven't even started on the business side of decision making. If I want a web presence, this thread is doing nothing for me. I'm just going to fire up Wordpress and move to the next step. Or Laravel if I want a fast prototype, etc.
Seeing how important this history has been in my own area of expertise makes me think I better start hitting the history books which would be important for my other areas of life. If you don't know your history, then you're handicapped when discussing the present.