I started my professional developer career with PHP 5.2 I think end of 2006.
While the langugage design was garbage, I the developer experience was quite awesome.
This was a curse and a blessing. On the one hand it lowered the bar for many people to get into programming, on the other hand it led many people to believe they can do anything even when venturing in system designs that were much above their pay grade.
I switched to JavaScript in 2011 and again, it was mostly for DX.
The language felt more light-weight (no $ or classes), while it still had similar problems as PHP and being able to use it full stack eased context switching rather much.
Node.js deployments felt much slimmer than setting up PHP with Apache/Nginx too.
I still missed a bit of the "drop a source file in a folder and its an API" feeling.
Last few weeks I played around with Cloudflare Workers and that got me a bit of the PHP feeling again. I can simply say "This file runs at that path" and be done with it.
While the langugage design was garbage, I the developer experience was quite awesome.
This was a curse and a blessing. On the one hand it lowered the bar for many people to get into programming, on the other hand it led many people to believe they can do anything even when venturing in system designs that were much above their pay grade.
I switched to JavaScript in 2011 and again, it was mostly for DX.
The language felt more light-weight (no $ or classes), while it still had similar problems as PHP and being able to use it full stack eased context switching rather much.
Node.js deployments felt much slimmer than setting up PHP with Apache/Nginx too.
I still missed a bit of the "drop a source file in a folder and its an API" feeling.
Last few weeks I played around with Cloudflare Workers and that got me a bit of the PHP feeling again. I can simply say "This file runs at that path" and be done with it.