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PHP Popularity: Is it decreasing and what to do about it?

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Re: PHP Popularity: Is it decreasing and what to do about it?

#11

Post by themodelplumber »

miohtama wrote: post #4

PHP popularity is decreasing because there are better tools for the same niche today. The same happened for Perl in 00s. The same is happening for every web backend language, as JavaScript is becoming ubique due to it being the de facto and only choice for the web frontend. Maybe PHP can be made better, but it would need some radical changes and then the question is that if it’s worth the effort and maybe to pick up…

What's the JS equivalent of "place an index.php file in a folder to deploy"?

What's the JS FOSS equivalent of ProcessWire as a CMF + CMS?

What's the JS equivalent to e.g. DreamHost and other drag + drop hosts?

(Legitimately curious, and I'm mainly inquiring after equivalents-for...better-thans would definitely be interesting)

Re: PHP Popularity: Is it decreasing and what to do about it?

#15

Post by Gys »

Minor49er wrote: post #9

PHP has already been "rebranded". When people try to dunk on PHP for supposedly being awful, people are quick to point out that that's all from "pre-PHP 5.6" and that "PHP 7/8" are bringing all kinds of excellent features, functionalities, and refinements The author links to the person thinking that HypeScript is a good name. He says: "The name HypeScript sounds like a logical name for me, it pays its respect to the…

Did not read the article, but hyperscript already exists: https://hyperscript.org/

Re: PHP Popularity: Is it decreasing and what to do about it?

#16

Post by haweemwho »

chinabot wrote: post #2

Personally, I'm not bothering to learn any new languages, stacks or APIs and will stick with what I know. AI will eventually (2-10 years) end up completely re-writing your whole program stack in machine code in whatever ISA without any bugs. The future of programming is a prompt engineer, write it in psudo code and english and output fully tested machine code.

So, AI prompt is the new language/stack/API that you refuse to learn?

Re: PHP Popularity: Is it decreasing and what to do about it?

#17

Post by boringuser2 »

miohtama wrote: post #4

PHP popularity is decreasing because there are better tools for the same niche today. The same happened for Perl in 00s. The same is happening for every web backend language, as JavaScript is becoming ubique due to it being the de facto and only choice for the web frontend. Maybe PHP can be made better, but it would need some radical changes and then the question is that if it’s worth the effort and maybe to pick up…

No, languages simply matter much less than they once did due to widespread adoption of best practices and good design.

The tooling around languages matters much more.

C++ isn't still popular because it's the best language.

Only real reason I'd always pick PHP over JS is not because I love PHP, but because Laravel is better than any node framework.

Re: PHP Popularity: Is it decreasing and what to do about it?

#18

Post by boringuser2 »

themodelplumber wrote: post #11
miohtama wrote: post #4

PHP popularity is decreasing because there are better tools for the same niche today. The same happened for Perl in 00s. The same is happening for every web backend language, as JavaScript is becoming ubique due to it being the de facto and only choice for the web frontend. Maybe PHP can be made better, but it would need some radical changes and then the question is that if it’s worth the effort and maybe to pick up…

What's the JS equivalent of "place an index.php file in a folder to deploy"? What's the JS FOSS equivalent of ProcessWire as a CMF + CMS? What's the JS equivalent to e.g. DreamHost and other drag + drop hosts? (Legitimately curious, and I'm mainly inquiring after equivalents-for...better-thans would definitely be interesting)

Do you really think the inability to create anything but an index.php file is the bottleneck?

Those people just use drop-in tools now which are better than custom applications for a large portion of standard use cases.

Re: PHP Popularity: Is it decreasing and what to do about it?

#20

Post by happytiger »

The issue I see is twofold.

1) First, understand that one audience matters particularly for programming language popularity, and that is people who are starting their careers. If you learn a language and use it for a few years, it tends to be a language you continue to use throughout your careers.

Here, we have no data. But I can tell you as someone who works with a lot of early stage startups and 20-somethings who are diving headfirst into programming for their startups for the first time, the language of choice is Python, followed by Javascript of some kind.

I have a long history with PHP and dearly love it as a language, but the concern I have is that it's not getting picked up like it was. Still love using it, and boy is Laravel productive for a small team.

That said, this is anecdotal, and I don't have any data here as the programming language surveys are always so broad they don't really have this kind of segmentation to spot early trends. Curious what others are seeing however...

2) Second, as chinabot pointed out, in the short term, AI is likely to supplement the work of programmers, making certain tasks faster and more efficient. However, as AI becomes more sophisticated and capable in the long term, it has the potential to largely replace a lot of programmers. In particular, AI's ability to automate the coding process means that many routine programming jobs may become unnecessary. While this shift may take some time, it's important for those in the programming industry to keep an eye on emerging AI technologies and be prepared for changes to come.

Does that imply that languages that are for working with AI would be the better programming languages to learn? Python, Julia, C++, Java and R are the current core languages in AI land. I don't think it matters in the short term, but the AI shift looks so big it could matter a lot in coming years.

IDK, doesn't look quite as cohesive and convincing as arguments after I wrote them down, but there are some pretty interesting points in here so I'll post it anyways to add to the discussion.

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