I don't understand what Java is doing in the list of "ground breaking languages" rather than on the one below, most of the claims are demonstrably (and demonstrated, by comments) wrong and little to nothing about java broke any new ground (unless a language becoming prominent through marketing and its ability to power corporate code monkeys is considered ground-breaking).

Jon McCarthy's Elephant seems to be missing from the list.

I don't see PHP on there...

I did see your followup that you were just razzing folks, but I thought about whether I would include PHP in that list and I think the answer is yes, with a Barry Bonds-esque asterisk.

I actually think that PHP, like Basic, was simple enough for the Everyone to grasp, and came with a good-enough standard library (always important). But I think what made it the swiss-army knife of web developers is that it was deployed _everywhere_.

One cannot login to [hosting provider du jour] and run Lisp, and let's not even discuss the devops horrors of trying to get a JVM to run on a server, let alone one shared by 50 of your closest friends. But you can edit index.php in notepad, ftp it to your hosting provider, and voilà: you have created your first dynamic content on the web.

I thought perhaps there might be some chicken-and-egg at work here, that if Wordpress had been written in Python (for example) that shared Python installs would be the default. But I realized that Python is a software engineering language. It has structure and enforces its use. But PHP allows, for good or bad, one to use whatever kind of crazy syntax style they like, in just about any filename they want, and it's likely still going to parse. In that way, it is very Perlish. But unlike Perl, normal folks can read it, which fosters a copy-paste-and-improve development cycle.

I do not, in any seriousness, understand why Facebook uses PHP; hell, uses? Built a damn compiler for it. But if I recall correctly, the answer at the time was "it works for us," which is all the justification that the outside world needs, I guess.

Just because you don't like the language doesn't mean its not important. It has been the gateway programming language for the web. Sure, experienced devs move over to python or ruby, but that doesn't make php any less important.

edit: seriously, its groundbreaking in the fact that it made dynamic website development accessible to everyone! That easily makes it more groundbreaking than half the languages on the list.

There are a few things I can think of that are missing. See the guidelines for additions at the bottom of the page.

I was being sarcastic :) the list was "groundbreaking new languages" and I was trying to spur up PHP haters out there for a good laugh. It's not funny when I explain it.

Just a tip. Being sarcastic/ironic/humorous on HN is not generally well received unless you actually have something to add to the thread.

I don't understand what people are doing in the list of HN comments on this thread.

The comments I've read so far surely do not belong in an intelligent discussion. My favorite comment, however, does.

/s

Yes, I copied the form of 90% of the comments here ironically.

People, it's not a definite list to be revered for all eternity. It's a fucking WIKI. Languages get moved up or down. You can probably go in and edit them yourself. See it as a starting point, and don't expect it to be 100% correct (which is not even possible).

That list is pretty silly. Perl belongs there, but Python does not (neither does Ruby, though it wasn't listed).

Perl and Python are both in the "pending someone mentioning something they did that noone else has done before" part of the page, they aren't considered part of the list.