I know it sounds childish but PHP is lame as hell same as java. Rust or go would have definitely been a cooler choice. I mean PHP gets the job done, but still....
Fwiw Lemmy is written in Rust
As a single developer taking on a passion project you go with what you know.
Also it must have been near impossible to have foreseen the insane explosion of popularity that has happened here the last few days.
Even then if you build something for passion you choose something that make you happy to use, however esoteric or impractical that may be to others, or how it would be perceived. Most probably it was never thought to be exposed in such a massive way, and certainly not as soon after the project was started (we're talking month(s) here).
Anyhow, for this project from the looks of it it is working fantastic.
Personally I've not used PHP for years but now I'm actually intrigued to take a new look at it.
I'm kinda impressed that in the four days I've been here, the site has gone from a bit slow and clunky to smooth and reliable. I guess in part that's just how computing speed has improved so much over the years. Even VPSes are cheap. We're not on a 400MHz Pentium II with spinning rust any more, where the idea of going to many thousand users in a short time was clearly impossible. These days things can scale upwards pretty quick.
In my opinion, only the most elite (in all the wrong ways) people care how you build your app.
PHP has flaws, sure[1]. But unless you are working on the app itself (or again, you are horribly elitist) it does not matter.
What matters is that the app is good. If the app is good, it doesn't matter that its done in PHP, what matters is that it works.
EDIT: I guess it also matters if you're selfhosting the app.
[1] I think PHP is overhated. As a stateless language it lacks a lot of complex features (and thus, admittedly, might be questionable for a project as large and complex as kbin), it has some questionable design decisions, but it's really not as bad as people make it out to be.
Modern PHP is supposedly pretty alright but yes I was surprised and a bit disappointed, I would have liked to contribute but I'm not gonna touch PHP in my free time lol.
This is similar to how I feel.
PHP is pain to developers Jerry!
There's a sister project at my work that still uses PHP. It did surprise me, but it's very well written and easy to maintain. I reckon php will be around for a while yet.
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