I don't use PHP personally as a developer but most of the things I self host are written in PHP, (NextCloud, BookStack, FreshRSS, RSS-Bridge, etc).
Yes there are faster, easier, and more elegant languages but PHP isn't going anywhere.
Usage statistics of server-side programming languages for websites
141–150 of 284 posts
Re: Usage statistics of server-side programming languages for websites
#142I 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,…
"Ruby (my personal interest, here) has been steadily gaining share in that chart year over year, despite not being "cool" anymore."
I have a comment from yesterday that is (rightly) sitting at -4 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28501661) that seems relevant: The rise of Ruby on that chart can be directly correlated with the rise of Shopify.
Elsewhere they note that Shopify "accounts" for 3.9% of the top million websites. The bulk of Ruby's increase.
Though I'm suspicious of the accuracy of their numbers. Most modern tech stacks don't announce themselves in the way that PHP did, and they clearly used curated metadata to attribute some major content engines (e.g. Shopify = Ruby, Wordpress = PHP, Wikis = PHP, etc), which means that anything outside of the top identifiable content engines isn't going to have proper attribution.
Further, note that literally any use gets credited. Look at the "popular sites using Shopify" at -
https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-shopify
Overwhelmingly they get the shopify/ruby credit for linking to a minimal checkout experience on a subdomain. That seems...incredibly dubious.
Still neat though. But what it really demonstrates is that product wins, not technology. Wordpress is clearly a winning product. Shopify is a winning product.
Re: Usage statistics of server-side programming languages for websites
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
It sure resonated with me, the occasional PHP user. Though I get that you can poke holes in anything.
You can, but "fractal of bad design" isn't really playing that game. The naming schemes for example. It's not that PHP made a choice and any choice can be criticised, the criticism is that PHP declines to make any choice whatsoever on naming. str-foo strFoo str_foo and FooStr are all defensible choices but having all four in your language is not.
That doesn't make the language less capable or less suitable. That's just an irregularity, causing an itch in certain people's heads. Personal preferences and obsessive-compulsive disorders don't make good arguments.
Re: Usage statistics of server-side programming languages for websites
#144A search of my country’s main job site says approx: 250 Ruby ads 420 PHP ads 1600 Java ads 1600 python ads 1300 .NET ads
New job postings is a good metric for new web sites, but new sites are a tiny fraction of the total internet.
I've also heard that you can use computers for other things than displaying web sites, but that might just be a rumor :)
Re: Usage statistics of server-side programming languages for websites
#145I 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?".
The report looks at multiple variables, not only response headers, to figure out backend language.
Re: Usage statistics of server-side programming languages for websites
#146[deleted]
Re: Usage statistics of server-side programming languages for websites
#147I 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…
These two pages provides some more information on the subject. https://w3techs.com/technologies https://w3techs.com/disclaimer
Thanks. The technologies page talks about selection, mainly: (1) either Alexa top 10 million or Tranco top 1 million; (2) only apex domains are counted. It doesn't talk about weighting at all, so coupled with the subdomain policy, a reasonable assumption is that the statistics are not weighted at all.
The disclaimer page also makes it clear that they don't analyze anything that requires interactions like signing in. Together with the subdomain policy, I suspect for any business where the landing/marketing site and the core business offering differ in technologies used (which is especially common for SaaS products), they will only pick up the marketing site. They also seem to allude to some sort of webmaster self-reporting mechanism though, not really sure what that means.
Re: Usage statistics of server-side programming languages for websites
#148PHP 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.
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Re: Usage statistics of server-side programming languages for websites
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a controversial opinion of mine, but many other languages have come and gone since PHP, yet it still dominates. With all the new alternatives nothing has taken over and it shows that stability and mature works better than change when there is not a critical need for it. Modern languages have also time and time again forsaken the ideal of making development LESS COMPLICATED than prior languages, and this is why t…
When else would you have time for sword fighting if not for compiling?
https://xkcd.com/303/
...showing my age with this comment
Re: Usage statistics of server-side programming languages for websites
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tons of companies still use PHP even for new projects. Likely in part due to its market saturation - it's incredibly easy to find PHP developers. Only developers complain about PHP. And even that isn't really warranted anymore as PHP has grown leaps & bounds since most of the hate.
It's incredibly hard to find good PHP developers. I just inherited a PHP project that it's a nightmare. It doesn't make any sense. It works on PHP 7.3 but the quality is worse than the old PHP 4 stuff. It is so easy to write good PHP code nowadays but most devs don't do it. They just go for the old ways, with spaghetti code, no clear architecture, etc, because it just works. They don't have to think, just type. Thats…
> It's incredibly hard to find good PHP developers.
But... is it much easier to find good devs in any other tech stack? I don't see it, personally. My ruby friends complain it's hard to find ruby devs at all, and harder to find good ones. I do see a lot of JS/node folks that get accepted as 'good', but when the rubber hits the road, the code is often still... meh - cut corners, SO copy/paste, etc.
I see bad node and bad js and bad python... but somehow the languages and stacks get a pass and "it was just a bad developer". But if you see bad PHP, people think "the whole language sucks". Completely inconsistent.