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Comment by mad_ | Hacker News Reader

I wonder... not rage bait btw... but PHP was super easy to program. I wonder if things like this are harder to build today. Like, before you could setup a LAMP stack and program a wiki in the time it takes to begin to wrap your head around the current programming paradigms.

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I don't think the languages changed; our minimum standards did. Standing up a bare-minimum user login in PHP for a homework assignment is easy. Now fix all the SQL injection, encrypt the passwords securely, lock down the database, make sure your cookies are always first-party, etc. There's a lot to hold in your head for secure web development in general.

> encrypt the passwords securely

Uh oh.

Whoops :) Don't forget the salt and hashing steps!

It’s not just the code, but the collaboration to write the actual pages.

Regarding PHP, a small wiki or cms was always a starter project back in the day. For sure it’s a good way to wrap your head around a language and project

PHP can hosted in so many places for so cheap. It still has a place, like everything

Today you can use LLM to get most of that. Whether anyone is willing to commit to the success of a LLM-driven project and a different problem.

No.

Wikipedia became popular despite its programming. Anyone who has ever tried to edit a Wiki page knows its editor is absolute garbage, for example. Want to create your own basic DIY wiki in 2026? Just set up a GitHub Pages which auto-accepts pull requests, you'll be up and running in less than 30 minutes.

Besides, nobody is forcing to to use the current programming paradigms. A classic LAMP stack will still work.

Oops, guess it was rage bait. (not OOP btw). I just figured the economist article was about programming. Don't have JS on this computer, so I couldn't read it.

1) I doubt The Economist is suggesting that technical complexity is the reason they think that something like Wikipedia won't happen again.

2) You still have LAMP, even if the A is now often Nginx and the M Postgres. That stack is at least as easy as back in the day (signed someone who in my teens loved PHP so much that I made CLI utilities and IRC bots with it, auch). But that's besides the point, because several programming languages and web frameworks now come with their own built-in web-server for development, so you don't even need a stack to get started! This part is easier today.

A LAMP stack is still possible. Some lean toward alternative "frugal" stacks, like https://learnbchs.org/

It’s not like choice is not there.

In 2003-2004 the benefit of php was really php.net letting you comment on any function

Also here, that’s still an option, and comments are still there and (I guess) open to new entries. So what is the concern pointed at here?

Just that there wasn't anything else like it at the time. There still kind of isn’t. The reduced context switching of curated questions and answers on the official documentation site is great.

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