I don't have any interest in defending PHP or Java specifically, but giant projects really are interesting. They're just not Computer Science.
The interesting thing about giant projects (say, hundreds of thousands of lines of code on up) is that they're by far the most complicated systems that humans have ever created. And coping with a million lines of unstructured logic is simply impossible.
Lots of interesting ideas in software engineering -- higher-level programming languages, modularity, abstraction, tiny-programs-connected-through-stdin-and-stdout, service-oriented architectures, et multa cetera -- are direct attacks on the problem of how to design systems that predictably exhibit incredibly complex behaviors.
These systems would be literally incomprehensible, and unbuildable, without the library of intellectual tools we've accumulated over the last couple of decades. That library is still growing. Maybe you or I will get to write a chapter. This is Interesting. But it certainly has little to do with the analysis of algorithms.
The interesting thing about giant projects (say, hundreds of thousands of lines of code on up) is that they're by far the most complicated systems that humans have ever created. And coping with a million lines of unstructured logic is simply impossible.
Lots of interesting ideas in software engineering -- higher-level programming languages, modularity, abstraction, tiny-programs-connected-through-stdin-and-stdout, service-oriented architectures, et multa cetera -- are direct attacks on the problem of how to design systems that predictably exhibit incredibly complex behaviors.
These systems would be literally incomprehensible, and unbuildable, without the library of intellectual tools we've accumulated over the last couple of decades. That library is still growing. Maybe you or I will get to write a chapter. This is Interesting. But it certainly has little to do with the analysis of algorithms.