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The story of Max, a real programmer

(incoherency.co.uk)
129 points surprisetalk | 1 comments | 30 Jun 25 12:57 UTC | HN request time: 0.207s | source
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brazzy ◴[03 Jul 25 13:11 UTC] No.44454676[source]▶
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.

replies(3): >>44454915 #>>44454987 #>>44455055 #
1. lelanthran ◴[03 Jul 25 13:42 UTC] No.44454987[source]▶
> 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.