I don't like PHP. I used to work as a professional PHP programmer, and after that, I *really* don't like PHP.
But - even if this thought is deeply disconcerting - PHP is critical infrastructure at this point. And the people who just worked their arses off to fix vulnerabilities in PHP systems are deserving of respect and solidarity, even if you think the PHP language is bad.
(Many of those people also don't like PHP).
@datarama also there must be a reason PHP is half of the Internet!
(I dislike PHP myself, but in the past I loved it.)
There's also thoughts about monocultures there somewhere...
@coder @datarama with limited resources, it does make the most sense to pool them around a few big projects. whether PHP really *deserves* its status on technical merits is debatable, but it *has it*, even if historical reasons play a big role in the why.
if we don't want monocultures, then we *really* need to advocate for better and stable funding for FOSS, both for PHP and other projects. notably, alternatives to PHP *are* plentiful, but a few early web frameworks/software like wordpress that happen to use it absolutely dominate the "market", where "early" and "uses PHP" has a certain amount of correlation. no matter how we turn it, we are not gonna get out of any of these discussions without talking about funding.
@bnuuy @coder @datarama oh, I don't disagree. With Wordpress it's kinda funny because I feel coders have just went all in in static site generators which are not really usable by non-coders, therefore making making Wordpress even more irreplaceable. (Yeah, I know there are alternatives.)
Also, shared PHP hosting is just... well, there's nothing quite like it also. Despite its flaws, it has enabled *so* much.
