Imagine a world in which your career, the careers of your friends and coworkers, and the businesses and industries built on PHP vanished overnight, or never existed at all. No Facebook. No Wordpress. Billions of dollars in online commerce, all gone. Flickr, Tumblr, MailChimp: poof!

This talk presents a dystopian world in which we are stuck updating each other via SMS or (gasp!) MySpace, reading content on corporate portals, and buying everything from just a handful of online marketplaces.

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Colin O'Dell at 11:06 on 4 Feb 2017

I really enjoyed this talk! Alternate timelines can be a tricky subject, but I totally agreed with the inferences Ben made.

I think the pace of presenting the charts was a little too slow - it quickly became obvious to me that Python was the "PHP alternative", but it took a few more minutes for the presentation to get there. Tightening this section up would really help with the flow.

Eric Morris at 11:46 on 4 Feb 2017

I didn't realize just how pervasive PHP usage was until this keynote. I did notice in the presented graphs that the PHP and Python plots seemed to be inverses of each other. Could this be a factor in the "declining interest" in PHP? IE, many developers were migrating to Python instead of PHP? In any case, Ben suggested that Python would have been the underpinnings of a modern web (more so than today in our actual universe) in the alternate universe. I personally wonder how much of the original design philosophy of Python was influenced by features which PHP was already offering. In any case, a pretty interesting talk.

Jesse Ulacia at 13:52 on 4 Feb 2017

Interesting perspective.

Joshua Sampia at 14:43 on 4 Feb 2017

It might sound homer-ish, but I don't want to hear about how my love language (PHP) is dying :( :(

Liviu Ifrim at 17:48 on 4 Feb 2017

I liked the approach. Thank you.

Cal Evans at 08:25 on 5 Feb 2017

Interesting message from one of my favorite speakers.

Symeon Quimby at 12:31 on 6 Feb 2017

Interesting look into an alternate dimension. I feel bad for the inhabitants of Earth 2 that never had the experience of PHP. At least they got Python, so it's not all bad. My heart goes out to the Earth that is FOSSless. That is truly a hell I would wish on no one. I would of liked to see some more inferences made for Javascript however. It would interesting to infer how much of its lead is from people who develop primarily in another language, but also develop in javascript cause of the front end that interfaces with their app (browsers).

James Fuller at 14:13 on 6 Feb 2017

I didn't really understand the message of this talk. There were a lot of references to conversations with people on twitter and I wasn't sure what to make of it. There were some graphs of different languages being used and their popularity. I guess the point was that without "community" php would fade away or something? There were entertaining parts of the talk that made me chuckle but I was left not really sure of what to do next.

David W. at 13:43 on 7 Feb 2017

Pretty cool to make us wonder like that. This could have been very boring but your philosophical and psychological insights it made it interesting. Thanks.

Creative presentation. The programming language comparisons were interesting.