![[No PHPun Intended] A Brief History of Web Development](https://nophpunintended.com/comics/a-brief-history-of-web-development.png){kind=link}
Yep, PHP is turning 30 this year! Wondering if “PHP is still relevant?” Ever since we have been hearing that PHP is dead. It was “dead” 10 years ago, 5 years ago, and “is dead” today. But somehow - it isn’t. Anyway… happy birthday!
Yep, PHP is turning 30 this year! Wondering if “PHP is still relevant?” Ever since we have been hearing that PHP is dead. It was “dead” 10 years ago, 5 years ago, and “is dead” today. But somehow - it isn’t. Anyway… happy birthday!
It’s very rare that the backend language significantly affects performance. In 99% of apps you could have the most optimized backend written directly in machine language, and you’d just shave off milliseconds.
That’s because in web development most of the latency comes from i/o (network requests, database access, file access), not from computation being slow.
So why did Facebook build that whole system of converting C++ to PHP or whatever they did? Was it because they didn’t understand the savings? Or when you scale that high, the savings really are significant? Were there savings?
Probably because someone said it was a good idea in a meeting.