Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Usage statistics of server-side programming languages for websites

w3techs.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 284 posts

Re: Usage statistics of server-side programming languages for websites

#101

Post by cardanome »

qsort wrote: post #63
cardanome wrote: post #45

PHP is a great fit for most web projects. It is battle tested with great backwards compatibility, fast, offers the best deployment story and combines the advantages of dynamic and static typing with it's gradual typing system (Think Typescript without the complexity of Typescript.) The next version is even going to improve on its weakest point, concurrency, with Fibers: https://php.watch/versions/8.1/fibers Sure we a…

> Probably needs some new languages with slightly different syntax I used to toy around with Haxe: https://haxe.org/ The idea in principle is great (use Haxe the language on your machine, then Haxe the compiler to produce PHP code and upload it to a cheap hosting somewhere), but I've never found a real use for it.

I am regularly stumbling upon Haxe. It seems like a well designed language but like you I never yet found a use case.

Though it seems to be also great for game dev. The show case of games written in Haxe is quite impressive:

https://haxe.org/use-cases/games/

Re: Usage statistics of server-side programming languages for websites

#102

Post by jjice »

I'm a recent grad and my job is working with PHP. I had always heard and told jokes about PHP being old and washed up (my favorite what that it stands for "Pre Historic Programming"). Then I started using PHP. Some quirks I didn't like at first, and some I still don't love, but it really is a solid language. Funniest part is that I'm using 5.6 (we're working on migrating to 8). I'm so excited to get some of the more modern features too. It really is a solid language for web programming.

If I were to work on a large scale web project on my own though, I'd probably still choose JS, Python, or Go, but PHP is a language that's won my respect.

Re: Usage statistics of server-side programming languages for websites

#103

Post by human »

jegea wrote: post #25

I think this shows how much HN is a bubble in itself. Most discussions here happen around new/exciting/cool/weird technology. And don't get me wrong, I love those discussions! That's why I come here! But reality outside of this bubble is people building and maintaining web apps as efficiently as possible and PHP hasn't stopped being very efficient. On the contrary, it's getting better with time. Interestingly enough,…

Hey! I also love PHP and Ruby. I was a fan of Rails until I discovered Laravel and I found it to be similar but better (and much faster). People who bash PHP should take a look at PHP 7/8 and what clean and professional PHP code can look like.

Re: Usage statistics of server-side programming languages for websites

#104

Post by BiteCode_dev »

lasereyes136 wrote: post #95
christophilus wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn’t it?

The implication is that WordPress sites don't represent what people are using to build software these days. This may or may not be a valid point of view depending on what you really want to know.

Not the implication is that wordpress is mostly a no code platform, so it would be interesting to have numbers for languages when people need to produce custom code.

Re: Usage statistics of server-side programming languages for websites

#105

Post by oefrha »

I don’t even know what market share / usage statistics means here. The FAQ doesn’t seem to answer the question and the actual report is behind an order form. So: how is it calculated? Is google.com weighted the same as mom-and-pop-restaurant-near-you.com? If not, how are they weighted respectively? Of course there’s also the problem of identifying the language without an x-powered-by or similar signal, which several other commenters pointed out.

Re: Usage statistics of server-side programming languages for websites

#106

Post by acdha »

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #13
clone1018 wrote: post #4

I wonder how much the results of this are skewed because PHP reports via the server response header that it is being used. Other languages like Elixir, Go, etc aren't so public about their usage unless one of their web frameworks adds it. I'd also love to see a study like this instead focused on "How much of the active web is wordpress?" and "How much of the inactive web is wordpress?".

Still, you can use it to gauge PHP to non-PHP. And there is an unknown percentage of PHP sites which turn this header off.

Your second sentence is why the first is unreliable: in particular, advertising server software and versions will get you flagged by most security auditors so the PHP sites which don't advertise will often be the largest and/or most interesting — for example, neither Etsy nor Wikipedia advertise that header.

Re: Usage statistics of server-side programming languages for websites

#107

Post by danaris »

mfer wrote: post #80
hexa22 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much of this is just the millions of Wordpress or Nextcloud installations? I’d be more interested in knowing how many unique apps or developers work on each language because in my experience I haven’t actually seen a single php developer other than Wordpress tweakers.

There are a lot of WordPress sites. The same site reporting the metrics on PHP also points out that WordPress is 42.5% of all sites [1]. That being said, I know a fair number of PHP developers. None of them are in SV or Seattle. They are in cities many have not heard of. They're all over. Some do public sites. Some do company internal web apps. Take a project like Symfony, a PHP framework. It's popular but not the mo…

> That being said, I know a fair number of PHP developers. None of them are in SV or Seattle. > There is software development happening all over the world.

I think this is probably the biggest part of the HN bubble: the idea that "tech hubs" like Silicon Valley make up all, or a supermajority, of tech workers.

I've never even visited the west coast, never lived in a town larger than about 20k people, and frankly never really want to live in a city. Yet I work in tech, and have my entire adult life. (At this point, I am, in fact, primarily a PHP programmer.)

And I'm hardly an exception.

Nearly every company over a handful of employees needs tech support, programming, a website, even servers managed. Many of these will hire internally. Others will turn to contractors—who are also locals.

Silicon Valley, with its high concentration of tech workers and ludicrous salaries, is very much the exception here, and a lot of HNers would do well to remember that, lest they end up looking as out of touch with the real world as Lucille Bluth asking about the price of a banana. [0]

[0] https://media1.giphy.com/media/yJu2jIQZgPubm/giphy.gif

Re: Usage statistics of server-side programming languages for websites

#108

Post by ransom1538 »

hexa22 wrote: post #54
jegea wrote: post #25

I think this shows how much HN is a bubble in itself. Most discussions here happen around new/exciting/cool/weird technology. And don't get me wrong, I love those discussions! That's why I come here! But reality outside of this bubble is people building and maintaining web apps as efficiently as possible and PHP hasn't stopped being very efficient. On the contrary, it's getting better with time. Interestingly enough,…

How much of this is just the millions of Wordpress or Nextcloud installations? I’d be more interested in knowing how many unique apps or developers work on each language because in my experience I haven’t actually seen a single php developer other than Wordpress tweakers.

Facebook (PHP/HHVM), Slack, Wikipedia, Esty are quite large with a ton of PHP devs. None of them are wordpress tweakers. PHP devs are out there! (Me!)

Re: Usage statistics of server-side programming languages for websites

#110

Post by fogihujy »

AzzieElbab wrote: post #38
jegea wrote: post #25

I think this shows how much HN is a bubble in itself. Most discussions here happen around new/exciting/cool/weird technology. And don't get me wrong, I love those discussions! That's why I come here! But reality outside of this bubble is people building and maintaining web apps as efficiently as possible and PHP hasn't stopped being very efficient. On the contrary, it's getting better with time. Interestingly enough,…

It is not about efficiency , it is about legacy. You can count number of Perl scripts out there and conclude that Perl is still the most popular scripting/devops tool in the world

In PHP's case it's about WordPress which still being deployed at a very high rate. While the blogging thing isn't that much in focus anymore, WordPress + Divi + WooCommerce is an extremely common stack for setting up eCommerce sites.

An yes, then there's Drupal, Laravel, Symfony, and many others, and they're going strong too. Heck, even Joomla is actively developed even though it's probably small enough today to be considered legacy.

Post reply on HN