this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2026
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Open source projects, while they can sometimes benefit to a limited degree, don't really need loads of full-time paid staff. I struggle to believe there's any great underlying issue here.
Exploits are effectively inevitable in all internet-exposed software. For PHP, running 70% of the internet, to get caught out this rarely is a really good sign that it's working fantastically well.
I just had a coder/sysadmin friend UNLOAD on me about the utter garbagehood of PHP. Both barrels. Something is missing in his analysis or mine - if it's unfathomably junky why is it still around?
(Note: I'm no expert on this shit just hoping some of the promise of open source will bear fruit by the time we're all huddled in basements and bunkers)
There's a couple of reasons. It's easy to learn, especially in comparison with what came before (I still have nightmares about CGI). If you already had HTML locked down, it's wasn't a big jump to coding PHP, whereas Javascript was less noob friendly. This meant that a lot of opensource web content management systems got built first on PHP. Wordpress has been mentioned, but that's ignoring the larger structural CMS systems like Joomla and Drupal.
At the time these projects were really hitting their stride (2005 - 2010), opensource systems built on a LAMP architecture were out-competing any proprietary language of similar capacity. The only one that came close to PHP's use was ASP and that was just because it had Microslop behind it. By 2010, PHP had pretty much dominated the existing opensource CMS community, which in turn meant most non-commercial websites and a fair chunk of commercial ones as well had their core interfaces written in PHP.
Does it have flaws? Absofuckinglutely. But it was the first widespread web programming language that was free, easy to learn, and worked well over 80% of the time across all browsers. Nothing since has really hit that sweet spot of being the right software for the right problem at exactly the right time, which is why its still in heavy use today.
Real goats used ASP web forms with visual basic. Anything else is inferior.
Honestly im still yet to find a web experience as simple as lamp + jquery. I used to be able to shit out websites at mega speed. Back in the days when it was normal to poop out a whole website in a few days