NodeJS is the new PHP aka it's the first language someone who want to "web stuff" pick up. A decade ago most blog post about PHP had major security issues because the people who wrote those posts were just learning the ropes and copying each other in the same way most tutorial about react these days don't care about cleaning themselve up, unit testing and all that stuff that make the difference between a cowboy and a software made with quality in mind.
The state of JS is maddening, whoever spit on PHP but love JS will need to explain why an hello world from create react app has 800 dependencies in the node_modules, why do we keep using babel when most browser is already supporting es6 fine and why do we have some many way to import modules. PHP had its issues which got fix over time but we can't say the same with JS.
I wonder how many more years it will take HN to stop pointing out client development idiosyncrasies when comparing Javascript to a language like PHP that has no client development story at all when supposedly trying to compare server-side DX.
Dude, Node is as broken as PHP. And it starts from having no standard library leading to hell like leftpad and general software supply chain holes that PHP never had in the same quantity.
It isn't clean. Node was just shinier and had more applications to leveraging it for a shiny frontend.
I don't think the language is the problem. As bad as it is, it is certainly more well thought that the original JavaScript. But PHP is used mostly by "businesses" with no budget and this is essentially the absolute rock-bottom of the "software" industry.
I think the language is the problem in some key areas. I started using PHP at the tail end of 2.x and remember trying to get a couple of endemic sources of bugs fixed in 3.x: register globals, requiring constant diligence NOT to ignore errors, and inconsistencies around things like parameter ordering for array functions or magic type conversion. Every time, it got pushback from someone saying it’d break too much code – at a time when there were billions of lines less PHP in the world, and when those were causing high profile security issues and app failures. I ditched PHP in the 2000s after getting tired of that, but picked up a legacy project a couple of years ago. Register globals is finally gone but everything else which I remember causing having to carefully train developers to avoid in the 90s is still a rake in the grass today.
