> Early in cloud computing, virtual machines were the compute abstraction […] This is funny to me because serverless sounds to me like the return of PHP (etc) shared hosting. What's old is new again?
It’s amusing to see a whole generation of senior developers (“senior” as in 5+ years of experience) that haven’t experienced web development without React[0] and who proceed to reinvent PHP/ASP.NET/RoR. [0] Used here as shorthand for “modern js driven development”
PHP is an unsafe, slow by default (execution model - the language itself fast), hard to use well, clunky, limiting and bloated language that is kept together by duct tape and the incredible effort and ingenuity of it's open source community by educating developers and improving/cleaning up the language at full blast, unfortunately often by breaking backwards compatibility.
Whether JS (including Deno) is a good alternative or the right answer is up for debate. But people who try to mimic some of the benefits of PHP in the JS ecosystem are not doing so accidentally or because of lack of experience.