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I changed my view on this―I hated how things were going full circle. But in reality, human civilization loves overdoing a particular direction and then reverts to the mean. You see this with the economy, moral fashions, everything.

I am an optimist in that I (have started to) believe that this slowly allows us to converge on better solutions for everything.

PHP was easy to set up, easy to host, easy to understand and easy to build stuff with, but it resulted in an unmaintainable mess over the long run.

Then Node was all of that, but JS was a better language than PHP. Then Node grew warts in the form of the clutter that is npm, then it grew complex build systems and unstable libraries.

Now there's Deno. It uses TypeScript by default, which is a surprisingly useful and productive language, it rethinks some things, it's much more secure by default, and now we're back at the PHP-level easiness to host using Deno Deploy.

We've ended up with an overall better solution and it only took us 20 years :)





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We didn't go back far enough, CGI is still where it's at.


We're there again with WASM and WAGI.

https://www.fermyon.com/blog/wasm-wasi-wagi


Are there any hosting operators providing wagi now?


I mean CGI still lives on just moved up the stack a bit with WSGI and Rack.


perl did nothing wrong


whilst technically correct, perl hackers on the other hand...


PHF was both fun and educational


> things were going full circle

Ya. Like a spiral. Or a spring, if you want to get fancy (add z-axis for time).

Each revolution seems redundant, but can be exploring a slightly different problem space, or trying a solution with a new angle.




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