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Usage statistics of server-side programming languages for websites

w3techs.com

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

#261
post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just had my worst PHP dev experience in 5 years of coding. Literally. I just had to leave the office. I'm on my way home and still feel fatigued. The project not only doesn't use composer (well, it does now because I needed some components) but it has the same third party components duplicated or triplicated around the application. It looks like they downloaded them Everytime they needed them. Some of them are modi…

Classic. Absolutely fabulous when this happens. Just want to nuke everything to oblivion. But there is hope, sometimes it can be better to inherit badly written repetitive & copy-pasted code, rather than badly written abstractions. Badly written abstractions can be really hard to get out of years later because it tends to be viral all over the project, however when there are no abstractions at all, you can decide the…

There's no unwinding. Boss says it should be done like this just to finish tasks quickly.

For the last couple weeks I've been thinking I should look for a new jobs as it looks there's no future here.

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

#262
post #78

Earlier 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…

Yes, for all the warts of the language, the worst thing about PHP is the illegible code that gets written by someone who glued together a bunch of solutions they found on StackOverflow. The good news is, in my experience, most of those people have moved on to JavaScript.

Note that I enjoy both PHP and JavaScript immensely. But, my God, some of the code that I've seen in both languages...

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

#263
I'm skeptical about the methodology here.

The Stack Overflow Developer Survey [0] is my go-to source for this kind of thing, and it has very different results. Of course, it's measuring overall popularity while W3Techs is looking at "server side programming languages for websites."

Here's how the ranks compare:

  Language     W3Techs     Stack Overflow
  PHP          1           11
  ASP.NET      2           8 (C#)
  Ruby         3           17
  Java         4           5
  Scala        5           26
  JavaScript   6           1
  static files 7           2 (HTML/CSS)
  Python       8           3
  Cold Fusion  9           N/A
  Perl         10          27
  Erlang       11          35
  Miva Script  12          N/A

[0] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021?_ga=2.2362093...

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

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wordpress is just a content management system built on top of php. It would be silly not to include everything that is built in php. Most php developers do not code in raw php (when avoidable). Most modern websites that are custom built tend to be a php framework.

I don't say otherwise, but there is a difference between using a platform and using a language directly.

Definitely, most web programmers don’t code directly in the language though. Core library devs will but most others use a framework of some kind that abstracts the developer away from the raw code. This helps speed things up in terms of developing, helps other programmers quickly begin to assist with pre existing projects and also provides standard prebuilt methods for handling authentication, sanitization

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

#265
post #165

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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

>>You can count number of Perl scripts out there and conclude that Perl is still the most popular scripting/devops tool in the world Perl is still heavily used. I wrote more than 2K lines just last week, lots of it is throwaway. But hey not many languages make it easy for you to write thousands of lines of throwaway code in hours. It's still the most useful language in the backend/unix world. This comes from me, who…

> Perl is still heavily used. I wrote more than 2K lines just last week, lots of it is throwaway.

Agreed. For any one-off (or occasional) task that in any way involves juggling text (which in Unix CLI world is nearly all of it), perl is still the fastest way to get done.

Back in '92 (roughly when I started using perl), its regex support was revolutionary. Today, all languages have decent string handling and regex support. And yet, none is quite so naturally well integrated as in perl. So here 30 years later, if I need to pick apart and recombine text, give me perl.

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

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Personal preferences and obsessive-compulsive disorders don't make good arguments.

And yet here you are defending PHP and indeed claiming that 'A fractal of bad design' was "particularly popular with" people who haven't written any PHP. Your poor paste is also not a good argument.

It was a completely terrible language and now it's merely mediocre. And yet, it has a particular niche because among other reasons lots of cheap bulk hosts throw in PHP hosting in their default package. It's popular for the same reason all those 1980s kids learned BASIC. BASIC isn't a good programming language, but it is a programming language and there were few other choices available to them.

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

#268
post #80

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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 neve…

I live in NY, but am not part of the NY "tech scene," because I find they are not particularly welcoming to me. I won’t go where I’m not wanted.

Not really a big deal. I'm pretty cutting edge, on the frontend (native apps for Apple systems, in Swift), but a bit stodgier on the backend (I use PHP). I’m not surprised at all by the survey results.

PHP works great for me. If I need something different (not an issue, so far), I'll hire it in. I'm actually fairly good at big projects in PHP. My code is maintainable and high-quality. It may not be “leet” PHP, but it works well.

Here’s an article about this kind of thing, that is a bit “meta”: https://veekaybee.github.io/2019/05/10/java8/

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

#269
post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And facebook...

Facebook has done impressive things with PHP, but they are one single entity. WordPress is an entire ecosystem with millions of users, and while Facebook changing their underlying stuff wouldn't be noticed by most, I can assure you there would be a large amount of people who noticed if WordPress decided to switch to ASP.NET or something.

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

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well to counter your anecdotal search Linkedin shows 31226 jobs for Ruby (U.S) vs 22208 for PHP. I think PHP isn't really strong in North American but more in Europe.

Anecdotal search? How so, please explain.

You're searching in one website which is intended for freelancers, that's not exactly a good representation of the software industry.
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