The story of Max, a real programmer

Early 2000s PHP was a DSL for very simple web apps. So it's no surprise it excels at that.

People soon found out that it was not very good at complex web apps, though.

These days, there's almost no demand for very simple web apps, partially because common use cases are covered by SaaS providers, and those with a need and the money for custom web apps have seen all the fancy stuff that's possible and want it.

So it's no surprise that today's languages and frameworks are more concerned with making complex web apps manageable, and don't optimize much (or at all) for the "very simple" case.

> People soon found out that it was not very good at complex web apps, though.

They eventually made it fit for purpose with Laravel ;-)

> These days, there's almost no demand for very simple web apps, partially because common use cases are covered by SaaS providers, and those with a need and the money for custom web apps have seen all the fancy stuff that's possible and want it.

I dunno about that.

In 2000, one needed a cluster of backends to handle, say, a webapp built for 5000 concurrent requests.

In 2025, a single monolith running on a single VM, using a single DB on another instance can vertically scale to handle 100k concurrent users. Put a load balancer in front of 10 instances of that monolith and use RO DB followers for RO queries, and you can easily handle 10x that load.

> So it's no surprise that today's languages and frameworks are more concerned with making complex web apps manageable, and don't optimize much (or at all) for the "very simple" case.

Maybe the goal is to make complex web apps manageable, but in practice what I see are even very simply webapps being mad with those frameworks.

I disagree. I would say most of the migration from PHP was due to the appeal of one language for frontend and backend, and fashion/hype. PHP is still very usable for server-side rendering and APIs. You say "very simple" as if you can't have complex systems with PHP.

I see the current state of web development as a spiral of complexity with a lot of performance pitfalls. Over-engineering seems to be the default.

> I would say most of the migration from PHP was due to the appeal of one language for frontend and backend

Definitely not. PHP lost far more market share to Java,C# and Ruby on Rails than to node.js

> PHP is still very usable for server-side rendering and APIs.

Not "is still", but "has become". It has changed a lot since the PHP 3 days.

> You say "very simple" as if you can't have complex systems with PHP.

With early 2000s PHP, you really couldn't, not without suffering constantly from the language's inadequacies.

> I see the current state of web development as a spiral of complexity with a lot of performance pitfalls. Over-engineering seems to be the default.

I don't disagree, but that seems to happen most of all in the frontend space.