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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

#51

I'm surprised nobody have linked the infamous "a fractal of bad design" article yet. It's particularly popular with people who have never written a line of PHP in their lives.

Also very popular with people who do write PHP for a living. Did a quick skim again and seems a lot of the complaints are outdated by now, but probably no hope to see the author to update their rant.

About a quarter of the article was invalid already at the time of its publishing, and another quarter was the author failing to contain their personal preferences from becoming vitriolic "arguments". But PHP does indeed still have quirks.

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

#53
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,…

what do you mean by "efficient"? Developer productivity or server performance?

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

#54
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.

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

#56
I don't understand how this methodology works. They claim "We investigate technologies of websites, not of individual web pages. If we find a technology on any of the pages, it is considered to be used by the website."

So then how on earth do they arrive at the claim that only 1.5% of websites use 'static content'? I would be astounded to discover that 98.5% of sites are using a serverside rendering technology to deliver every single page on their site (let alone their CSS, javascript, images, favicons, robots.txt files...)

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

#57

As an ex PHP developer, I don’t think it will ever go away. There is just way to much software that was written in PHP (e-commerce, blogs, CMS systems, Nextcloud/ownCloud, …) that isn’t going away. PHP isn’t something I ever want to touch again (its libs are wonky and I dislike the syntax choices of the last years) but the execution model was sort of nice before the frameworks (an entry point with a clean state you c…

Why would PHP want to go away? It's developing and there's plenty of software being written in it now and it will continue to do so.

There's not much wrong with modern PHP. Symfony and Laravel projects are a joy to work with. The standards and tooling is there too with composer, phpunit, PSR-4.

I don't think you've ever been into PHP if you was only wrenching in old projects.

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

#58

A 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

This is likely more accurate than the OP link. My experience is that Ruby jobs are less common but that they seem to pay far more.

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

#59
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 super bubble, it's a great bubble because it's a bubble I am part of, but it's almost extreme sometimes how much of a bubble it is. Really any topic of PHP, security, Apple, privacy etc showcase the bubble.

I am sure the stats are somewhat off due to what others said about it being harder to detect Python, etc. But it's probably not that far off, this community greatly overestimates the usage of more "developer friendly" language combinations like Python+Django, etc.

What people really want is a solid CMS or off the shelf product they can tailor to their needs and since pretty much everyone of the most popular CMSs (Drupal, WordPress, Magento, PrestaShop) is PHP based this is no surprise.

That leaves a small portion of asp.net CMSs (Kentico, Umbraco, episerver, dotnetnuke, etc) and a bunch of hosted solutions (Wix, SquareSpace, etc).

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

#60

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…

I use PHP more for "shell" scripts then I do for web stuff nowadays, I find its just faster to bang out something somewhat complicated in it then other langs I know currently.
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