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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

#61

Post by dubcanada »

hexa22 wrote: post #54
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,…

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.

You've never seen a PHP developer?

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

#63

Post by qsort »

cardanome wrote: post #45

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…

> 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.

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

#64

Post by gabereiser »

I'd love to see this with wordpress filtered out. I think most small businesses and personal sites run PHP simply because that's what wordpress uses. Subtract wordpress from the php statistics and you get a real picture of "who's using what" without the skewed "I'm using php because I installed wordpress and I know nothing about building websites". This isn't to say people who know how to build sites don't use wordpress either, I'm simply stating that it would be more accurate to measure sites that aren't wordpress to see what languages are being used by companies on the interwebs.

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

#65

Post by adventured »

cardanome wrote: post #45

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…

> but let's no forget PHP allowed the average Joe to hack up his own dynamic websites without jumping any hurdles

One of the great things about PHP is that that is still ever-present. It's fairly easy to get started utilizing PHP, just as it was 15 years ago. The basics of PHP have not gotten much more complicated over time.

Open a text file, write out a bit of PHP, save it, run it somewhere (locally or on a cheap host). Any Joe can still do it. I can't think of much that has gotten more difficult about getting started with PHP versus the first time I used it.

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

#66

Post by daneel_w »

tyingq wrote: post #9
christophilus wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn’t it?

I'm sure it does, but that then mostly changes the meaning of "most used...language" to mean most used by end users, versus most used by developers. Which I suppose you could argue, since it's likely passing through apache/nginx, which is fronting wordpress. So maybe 'C' is the most used.

The article emphasizes "server-side", which to me translates into "the most deployed..."

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

#67

Post by NovemberWhiskey »

tyingq wrote: post #9
christophilus wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn’t it?

I'm sure it does, but that then mostly changes the meaning of "most used...language" to mean most used by end users, versus most used by developers. Which I suppose you could argue, since it's likely passing through apache/nginx, which is fronting wordpress. So maybe 'C' is the most used.

... and indeed PHP itself is written in C.

They say they use publicly available information about sites, plus scraping metadata from the sites, but do not reveal the blend between those sources.

If they're relying primarily on scraping (which I have to think they are, given the scale of the operation otherwise), they're really measuring "what proportion of sites make use of languages which we can easily fingerprint in their stacks".

What I think this is telling us is that WordPress is popular, that WordPress is written in PHP, and that PHP is profligate in its use of headers that announce its usage. That doesn't seem very interesting.

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

#68

Post by BiteCode_dev »

pluc wrote: post #20
CodeyWhizzBang wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. It would be interesting to see the PHP sites broken down into wordpress and non-wordpress

Why? They're both PHP

Because using a cms doesn't mean people chose a dev stack but rather a platform. The conclusion is not the same. E.g: most wordpress freelancers do not code.

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

#69

Post by pineconewarrior »

jrwr wrote: post #60
cardanome wrote: post #45

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.

Yes! PHP is great for this. I often use it for things that people might use Python for, too, except on the web.

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

#70

Post by josefx »

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?".

When I heard that question several years ago in the sense why haven't Java/C# replaced PHP the answer was simple: nearly every web host offered a pre-configured web stack with PHP, MYSQL, etc. and setting up anything else was neither cheap nor easy . Seems to be nearly the same today, the first few dozen hosting providers I can find on Google either have WordPress or a one click WordPress install.
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