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Usage statistics of server-side programming languages for websites

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

#43

Post by brightball »

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,…

I tell people all the time about how good the Ruby job market is. Lots of opportunities and not a ton of people to fill them for some reason.

People from other languages don’t seem to want to believe it.

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

#44

Post by api »

smoldesu wrote: post #29
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 could very well be that PHP is easier to distribute, and gets used in lots of groupware/industry-standard software that's deployed thousands of times across thousands of organizations. I'd imagine that kind of market share piles up after a while.

This is exactly it. Lower friction wins. You can just upload PHP scripts and go, while almost everything else requires many more installation steps or even monstrosities like Kubernetes.

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

#45

Post by cardanome »

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 all remember the bad old times and the horrible legacy projects that are still around but let's no forget PHP allowed the average Joe to hack up his own dynamic websites without jumping any hurdles. It helped democratize the internet for a while.

I really don't get why PHP is not more liked in hacker circles. Probably needs some new languages with slightly different syntax that transpiles to it for it to be hip again.

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

#46

Post by Majestic121 »

jalino23 wrote: post #24

this comment section is deluded. its like they live in a bubble. tons of companies use php, my company uses it even for modern development. get out of your own bubble dude

It's not about living in a bubble : Python being at barely 1% means that there's very probably a problem in data gathering.

Another survey : https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#web-framework... Puts the first PHP web framework not even in the top 10 of uses, behind framework in JS, Python, C#, Java.

How is this data even gathered ? And what is usage ? Do 1000 Wordpress count as 1000 servers ?

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

#47

Post by clone1018 »

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,…

I suspect these reports also have a good 5-10 years lag time from when a language gets popular, early adopters start using & creating libs, and then finally actual companies start adopting it. From that point there's a lull of development to get the site up, and then a couple of years later everything finally blossoms and the technology shows up on this chart.

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

#49

Post by adventured »

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?".

It's a very common config change these days to turn off expose_php (stop reporting by X-Powered-By header that PHP is installed on the server). You'll see this suggestion across nearly all forums related to PHP. That has been true for a decade or more at this point.
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