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A comment on Picking technologies on the right side of history. Parent comment

Re:Picking technologies on the right side of history by swombat on Wednesday December 07, 2011 @12:58PM (#3324927)
Agreed. 10 years ago, PHP (like Java) was a great bet, despite its flaws. A startup building a fresh technology stack and picking PHP today is standing on the wrong side of history, though. PHP can't be abandoned in the same way that Flex can, but it can become irrelevant in the way that Perl has done.

(not trying to bash Perl, but it's hardly the most relevant language to web development today)

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Re:Picking technologies on the right side of history by peteretep on Wednesday December 07, 2011 @04:26PM (#3326114)
> (not trying to bash Perl, but it's hardly the most relevant language to web development today)

What on earth does that /mean/? What would make a language relevant? Would it be a huge community writing and releasing code every day? (http://search.cpan.org/recent) Would it be lots of conferences? (http://lanyrd.com/topics/perl/past/) Would it be sexy startups using it? (http://duckduckgo.com/, http://selectablemedia.com/)

So...?

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Re:Picking technologies on the right side of history by andrewflnr on Wednesday December 07, 2011 @06:57PM (#3326810)
Possibly he means percentage of new projects using it, or maybe something like its influence on the future, which is related. It's hard to define, but you sort of know it when you see it.
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