Whenever I read HN talking about PHP I am reminded of the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. The level of discussion on the topic is abysmal, compared to (I guess perceived?) the discussion on other topics.

It's interesting how clearly 80% of the developers in the community clearly have 0 clue about modern PHP. People mention shared hosting, code in html files, CGI and bad security defaults. To be clear these things have been dead in the PHP world for 10+ years, but most developers here have used it once in 2005 and haven't seen how it looks like in the modern ecosystem.

It's as if whenever the topic was Java, the discussion would center only around the devs working with Java 1.8.

Likely, the rest of the discussion on HN is of the same level, but I have a harder time spotting the errors.