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Usage statistics of server-side programming languages for websites

w3techs.com

151–160 of 284 posts

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

#151
Seems like a possibly good business strategy for w3techs.

They publish numbers that are very surprising to most people, like Python and JS are used on 1.5% of sites vs PHP on 79%, then offer some very handwavy text about the data ("In order to obtain any information from websites, we rely on the websites themselves"), and then offer a full report for $$$ where they probably more fully own up to how they come up with this clearly flawed data.

In the end the paying customer sees the shortcomings of the data, feels relieved that their assumptions weren't invalidated and has invested some money to doing due diligence.

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

#152
Not sure how representative this is of people actually writing code.

I run a bunch of websites doing various little things. One is a Wordpress blog. I wanted a blog-like site so that myself and a few non-technical friends could write and publish articles on a particular subject. The easiest and most reliable and well-supported solution was to just install Wordpress. Throw in a few plugins from the Wordpress repo for any functionality it doesn't already have.

I don't understand PHP particular well, and don't feel very inclined to learn it. But hey, I don't need to, Wordpress already works fine, and there's probably already a plugin to do anything I might reasonably want to code up.

I find some of the security practices disturbing - it seems to be standard practice for the web process to have full write access to all the code files and the database. If anyone ever compromises the server code, guess they have full access to pretty much everything. But whatever, it's a standalone server with nothing but the blog. I have an Ansible playbook for the setup, so I can kill it and spin up a new one if it ever breaks.

So there you go, I'm responsible for a PHP site without writing any PHP. Probably lists like this represent a lot more low-skill deployments of existing proven codebases than bespoke projects.

There's probably something going on about ease of deployment too. I much prefer writing Ruby/Rails apps, but I don't actually know of any existing ones that I'd say are easy to do a low-skill deployment of in the way that PHP is. The nice part about things that are terrible from a security standpoint like the web process doing all upgrades and plugin installs is that it makes it much easier for less-technical people to deploy and manage it. Or people who are high-skill, but don't feel like applying all their skills towards a task that already has a straightforward solution.

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

#153
42% of all websites are on Wordpress, which is written in PHP.[a] The vast majority of those websites use vanilla WordPress out-of-the-box to serve a tiny audience.

If you look at market share by traffic, a much smaller share than 79% of the world's largest web sites (Wikipedia, YouTube, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, eBay, PornHub, etc.) run on PHP. Those websites account for the vast majority of Web traffic.

[a] Source: https://wordpress.com

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EDIT: I changed "0.0%" to "a much smaller share than 79%" because I was wrong about Wikipedia, Facebook, Pornhub and likely other high-traffic websites. See comments below.

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

#154
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,…

Laravel on PHP 8, especially with a few add-ons like Tailwind, Tailwind UI, and Livewire (for SPA-like stuff) is so efficient with so little code it's hardly funny.

I'm convinced if you are a typical medium-sized business trying to recreate that technology with Node, Express, React, and a billion NPM packages, your are doing things the unnecessarily hard way.

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

#155

Modern PHP is good.. I really enjoyed working with laravel, however when you're young and want to continue further in your career.. it's rarely used in big tech companies. I moved away from it since I join enterprise company. Still missed it, but anyway big companies tend to use python, java, c#, c++. I missed php, but I don't hate python or c#. In fact I like them both as well. Also because they're all turing comple…

Top 10 millions websites according to Alexa or top 1 million websites according to Tranco, so no micro services.

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

#156
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,…

HN is a place for people building sartups, I doubt that the share of PHP usage in people building Saas startup is much

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

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude I am old. When I was working with PHP I had to watch out for diffs between 4.x and 5.x servers. Hell, I think we hat some old 3.x code even. Frameworks where new, composer didn’t exist and I was getting annoyed of getting Paamayim Nekudotayim as an Error because the where limitations in the engine when it comes to finding the static methods of a class instance. Thing is those OLD projects where new when I was wo…

I am old also, and I have maintained some PHP code for about 18+ years now. From PHP 4 to PHP 7.4. The changes and improvements are dramatic and wonderful. Improvements in speed, security, error processing, functionality/integration with databases, Composer, etc... While I am not suggesting you go back to PHP, but things are simply not the same anymore.

I know it is not the same anymore. It doesn’t invalidate my experience from back then and the reason I left the community. And to get a response along the line that, I don’t get to have an opinion because the stuff I worked on was “OLD SHIT” is insulting.

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

#158
This is interesting from a 30,000 foot view, but without knowing the details on the companies and how they are using the language it is hard to draw conclusions.

For example:

- As many pointed out, are the majority of PHP just default Wordpress sites? I would rather know who built in a given language rather than installed a site that happens to use a language. - I use to be in the banking world and it as all Java (or C++ for algo trading, Scala for data processing, but never NodeJS), but I haven't seen many new startups using Java unless the founders came from banking. The industry made a difference. - How old is the company - a 30+ old company might have Perl.

Also, a bit surprised at Javascript, AKA NodeJs. I thought it would be higher.

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

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

cPanel could probably included, it's nearly on all web hosts.

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

#160
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,…

While everyone else was saying learn Node, PHP is dead, and all that stuff on here - I ran the other way and learned PHP.

No regrets because the last few years, never has an ecosystem been so bright.

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