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Usage statistics of server-side programming languages for websites

209 points by TicklishTiger 5y ago

jalino23 5y ago
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
- Majestic121 5y ago
  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-frameworks 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 ?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
57844743385 5y ago
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
- hexa22 5y ago
  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.
  - hparadiz 5y ago
    This is why I recommend converting from Ruby to PHP. Costs are way lower and it's easier to find devs.
    - midrus 5y ago
      Sure, and rewriting everything is easy and a piece of cake too
      - hparadiz 5y ago
        I've been in a situation before where a company was being quoted 20k for one new system build out by an outside agency to work on their ruby site. They wanted an events page with an admin back end. Instead I hired a Junior PHP dev for them making 75/year who converted the entire existing site in 8 weeks and then proceeded to build the same events functionality for a fraction of the cost and then went onto building the wish list of features they wanted over the next year. If they went with the outside agency they'd have spent 300k and probably not even had a good outcome. This was 10 years ago though so inflate everything I said across the board by 25%.
- thehappypm 5y ago
  New job postings is a good metric for new web sites, but new sites are a tiny fraction of the total internet.
  - moystard 5y ago
    Existing companies still need to hire, and the job market is a good reflection of what technologies are in-demand at any given moment.
  - scbrg 5y ago
    I've also heard that you can use computers for other things than displaying web sites, but that might just be a rumor :)
- unnouinceput 5y ago
  A search, right now, on Upwork does the following: PHP - 12316 jobs Ruby - 1175 jobs Java - 5902 jobs Python - 10051 jobs .NET - 2353 jobs Adding a few of the others: C# - 2562 jobs (I suspect those .NET also can be interchanged with C#) C++ - 1711 jobs Go - 3925 jobs Rust - 382 jobs Feel free to double check my results. Like it or not, Upwork is the largest freelancer site.
  - oefrha 5y ago
    Upwork also skews towards one-off gigs for businesses serving a tiny audience, often with <=$100 pay. The average full-time, long-term job offering could be equivalent to maybe 50 average Upwork jobs (just a ballpark number I pulled out of nowhere).
    - unnouinceput 5y ago
      And let's assume your pulled from nowhere ballpark number would be true. Even then the percentage of those jobs would still be in favor for PHP, with PHP being an order of magnitude higher than Ruby
  - joelbluminator 5y ago
    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.
    - unnouinceput 5y ago
      Anecdotal search? How so, please explain.
      - joelbluminator 5y ago
        You're searching in one website which is intended for freelancers, that's not exactly a good representation of the software industry.
BoumTAC 5y ago
As the famous adage say: There are people who write blog post and there are people who write code.
BiteCode_dev 5y ago
I wonder if this is because the report includes wordpress web sites.
- christophilus 5y ago
  Why wouldn’t it?
  - tyingq 5y ago
    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.
    - daneel_w 5y ago
      The article emphasizes "server-side", which to me translates into "the most deployed..."
      - BiteCode_dev 5y ago
        Yes, I don't say it's wrong, I'm just curious.
    - NovemberWhiskey 5y ago
      ... 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.
  - lasereyes136 5y ago
clone1018 5y ago
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?".
- adventured 5y ago
  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.
  - astura 5y ago
    It's not just PHP, turning off X-Powered-By (or similar) is part of any server hardening standard for any language I've ever seen (and implemented).
- WesolyKubeczek 5y ago
  Still, you can use it to gauge PHP to non-PHP. And there is an unknown percentage of PHP sites which turn this header off.
  - acdha 5y ago
    Your second sentence is why the first is unreliable: in particular, advertising server software and versions will get you flagged by most security auditors so the PHP sites which don't advertise will often be the largest and/or most interesting — for example, neither Etsy nor Wikipedia advertise that header.
    - WesolyKubeczek 5y ago
      Still, if you change "78%" to "at least 78%", it's impressive nonetheless.
easton 5y ago
I'm curious how this changes if you remove PHP being used for WordPress (where the people using it probably didn't choose it). Do lots of companies still choose PHP for brand new projects? I know Facebook has a dialect they still use, but you don't hear much about it anymore.
- 0x0nyandesu 5y ago
  PHP is my bread and butter. Yes there are still shops that use it. It doesn't really deserve the bad rap.
  - qsort 5y ago
    As a Java dev I feel you. PHP, Java are both languages that used to be god-awful, but they have evolved massively in the past decade and most of the criticism is outdated.
  - WesolyKubeczek 5y ago
    It's bearable since version 7, and unless they make it another Java in version 8 which will make it unbearable again, it's gonna be ok. Kids who want to seem cool have moved on to Go and NodeJS, so PHP is mainly left with people who got some experience and mostly know what they are doing, save for those who really just twiddle Wordpress until it sort of appears to do what they want it to do. I suspect that PHP's ultimate fate is to become another Perl — a quite mature platform with very few people tending to it, obscure, with a community of very expensive veteran programmers.
    - deweller 5y ago
      PHP 8 has been out since November. It adds some typing but everything is optional. PHP has always been a loosely typed language. Converting to a strongly typed language would against the grain of the entire culture and history of PHP. https://www.php.net/supported-versions.php https://www.php.net/supported-versions.php https://www.php.net/releases/8.0/en.php https://www.php.net/releases/8.0/en.php
    - 5y ago
57844743385 5y ago
Lies, damn lies and statistics.
draw_down 5y ago
No, I’m pretty sure it’s C. Your PHP code is nice and all, but nothing happens with it until C does its thing.
qsort 5y ago
How did Ruby increase that much lately? Also, I'm surprised Python isn't more popular. 1% is (comparatively) tiny for a language that popular.
- formerly_proven 5y ago
  How would you tell a given page was generated by some Python or Ruby webframework? There aren't any headers these use (like PHP usually does), so you'd have to look for more subtle cues like the name of session cookies or perhaps patterns in the way static files are addressed. The same goes for pretty much everything on that list which isn't PHP or .NET.
  - qsort 5y ago
    Yes, that's a good point. The "[...] of all the websites whose server-side programming language we know" clause changes the interpretation dramatically.
  - daneel_w 5y ago
    It swings that way for PHP as well. Several large PHP frameworks don't report PHP in the literal sense in the response headers.
- julienpalard 5y ago
  I bet most Python web frameworks (just checked with Django) don't report being Python (or even the said framework) in HTTP headers, so it can't be counted. Another point of data could be: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=php%2Cpython%2Cdjango%2Cwordpress https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=php%2Cpython%...
- herbst 5y ago
  The ruby eco system is growing and majoring every day. It's just not cool anymore :)
- qaq 5y ago
  Discourse sites ?
inovica 5y ago
This is probably correct and a lot of software still uses PHP. Wordpress being one of the huge ones. I actually see a lot of people still developing in PHP, though my own involvement finished years ago. I think because we sometimes operate in a bubble, it's always a surprise to see this
daneel_w 5y ago
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.
- rich_sasha 5y ago
  It sure resonated with me, the occasional PHP user. Though I get that you can poke holes in anything.
  - tialaramex 5y ago
    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.
    - daneel_w 5y ago
      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.
      - tialaramex 5y ago
        > 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.
jegea 5y ago
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, Ruby (my personal interest, here) has been steadily gaining share in that chart year over year, despite not being "cool" anymore. If you ask me, it's good to have a dose a reality from time to time!
- smoldesu 5y ago
  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.
  - api 5y ago
    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.
    - heurisko 5y ago
      Modern PHP application development doesn't really use the "deploy PHP scripts to a folder" model any more. The more likely scenario is that a framework with a front controller is used, which is invoked by php-fpm, proxied by nginx. It's easy enough to do, though.
      - lowercased 5y ago
        The bulk of what I do is still, essentially, 'deploy to a folder'. There's some build steps, and a symlink swap from old to new, but that's still what it's doing. And I can still go edit a single file in a folder some place if I need to test/debug something. That's rare, but there are times when production is the only place an issue shows up (or... the only place you can replicate it - usually you can figure out enough from that to replicate locally later).
malf 5y ago
How is this measured?
johntdaly 5y ago
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 can work yourself through). The statistics are a bit misleading though. Just because 80% of the sites run PHP in some way doesn’t mean there are that many Jobs. A lot of the work with PHP world is not necessarily going to be PHP work (a lot of HTML, JavaScript and Plugin configuration) and there is complexity in learning your way around a system well enough to build plugins. The jump from beginner to expert has become harder for a new PHP programmer because the real programming is hidden behind a wall of already existing code that just needs to be installed, configured and customized. I’m glad I got out when I did because I get to actually program APIs and Single Page Apps rather than just being a glorified PHP webpage mechanic.
- mathattack 5y ago
  Good point on jobs vs existing code base. It’s kind of like radio still has a lot of listeners but the amount of new stations isn’t rising as dramatically as other mediums.
- dncornholio 5y ago
  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.
  - johntdaly 5y ago
    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 working on them. When I got into WordPress back then It was NEW. When I got in to jQuery it had 3% market share and it was the underdog. A lot of the arguments you might be sick of hearing about, well back then they where valid.
beached_whale 5y ago
I wonder how much of that is wordpress, they have a really large user base and run on php
mjburgess 5y ago
We should distinguish between applications developed in PHP, from installations of apps which happen to be developed in PHP. I suspect one would see the former drop off a cliff, whilst the latter will always be quite high -- due to first-mover effects.
manaskarekar 5y ago
Offish-topic: PHP docs are awesome.
- jonwinstanley 5y ago
  Agreed, having user contributions of example code underneath is often really helpful and something I miss when looking up other languages
cushychicken 5y ago
PHP is still by far the most used server-side language ...due to WordPress, I'm guessing.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
cardanome 5y ago
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 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.
- jrwr 5y ago
  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.
  - pineconewarrior 5y ago
    Yes! PHP is great for this. I often use it for things that people might use Python for, too, except on the web.
- qsort 5y ago
  > Probably needs some new languages with slightly different syntax I used to toy around with Haxe: https://haxe.org/ 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.
  - cardanome 5y ago
    I am regularly stumbling upon Haxe. It seems like a well designed language but like you I never yet found a use case. Though it seems to be also great for game dev. The show case of games written in Haxe is quite impressive: https://haxe.org/use-cases/games/ https://haxe.org/use-cases/games/
jl6 5y ago
Rephrased: 78.9% of sites that expose implementation details of their backend run PHP. Or claim to.
cm2187 5y ago
It is interesting that asp.net has been falling like a rock despite .net core. Any idea why?
jameshart 5y ago
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...)
gabereiser 5y ago
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.
- ychompinator 5y ago
  My thoughts exactly.
BusTrainBus 5y ago
Nobody tell Jeff Attwood, he chose a complex tech stack for Discourse 10 years ago, with the explicit aim that it would be so easy and powerful that the “PHP virus” would be defeated.
streamofdigits 5y ago
Some ecosystems go extinct but others stabilize for long periods and might surge again under the right conditions. Python was around for decades before it became a good fit for data science / machine learning and interest in the language exploded. Php seems to be in such a stable phase, fixing old issues, modernizing and powering real apps used everywhere. Wordpress is being mentioned, but don't forget that wikipedia / mediawiki is also php and what those folks are doing with wikidata is ground breaking. There are plenty of scenarios in which php could grow again, e.g widespread decentralization using nextcloud, wikidata or similar.
aynyc 5y ago
How do they measure it? I can't seem to find their method.
boringg 5y ago
How is this state even determined? If we exclude Facebook & Wikipedia how much market share is left after that? I ask as the statistic seems to be projecting that it is the most popular amongst people, but it feels like it is a legacy language. Maybe adding in how much new server unrelated to the legacy apps are written in PHP would be a good contrast.
dsego 5y ago
PHP has quite a few things going for it. File-system based routing before it was cool. Each request cycle is isolated, so an error in your script won't bring down the whole server. With shared hosting, you get something very similar to serverless functions today. The language was created with embedding tags from the start, so there is no need to build or use 3rd party template parser. Everything outside of php tags just gets outputted as strings, very similar to JSX. The biggest downside is (was?) C-style file includes, instead of packages.
FormFollowsFunc 5y ago
Outside of Wordpress, I don't think the PHP ecosystem is in a great state. I worked with it recently and the availability of 3rd party libraries wasn't great. A lot of them were abandoned. Python and JavaScript have healthier ecosystems.
- jonwinstanley 5y ago
  Symfony is very healthy plus there are a load of packages around Laravel and Symfony that can be used independently
blodkorv 5y ago
I use php for pretty much everything. Php has a lot going for it, there are tonnes of developers who knows the ecosystem. It works on every OS/plattform there is. The performance is decent. Any systadmin out there knows how to admin an php application. The tooling is mature and you are not bound to any specific editor or ide. For me its the perfect language.
oliwarner 5y ago
The last few server-side languages I've used don't use extensions or publish a header banner. In many cases it's just not possible to tell what's running. w3techs admit as much in their disclaimer. The data and conclusions from it are junk. > In order to obtain any information from websites, we rely on the websites themselves, their owners or their webmasters to provide such information. Some websites are more open to sharing this type of information than others. Some technologies may provide more means to reveal information about their usage than others.
jjice 5y ago
I'm a recent grad and my job is working with PHP. I had always heard and told jokes about PHP being old and washed up (my favorite what that it stands for "Pre Historic Programming"). Then I started using PHP. Some quirks I didn't like at first, and some I still don't love, but it really is a solid language. Funniest part is that I'm using 5.6 (we're working on migrating to 8). I'm so excited to get some of the more modern features too. It really is a solid language for web programming. If I were to work on a large scale web project on my own though, I'd probably still choose JS, Python, or Go, but PHP is a language that's won my respect.
oefrha 5y ago
I don’t even know what market share / usage statistics means here. The FAQ doesn’t seem to answer the question and the actual report is behind an order form. So: how is it calculated? Is google.com weighted the same as mom-and-pop-restaurant-near-you.com? If not, how are they weighted respectively? Of course there’s also the problem of identifying the language without an x-powered-by or similar signal, which several other commenters pointed out.
- tored 5y ago
  These two pages provides some more information on the subject. https://w3techs.com/technologies https://w3techs.com/technologies https://w3techs.com/disclaimer https://w3techs.com/disclaimer
  - oefrha 5y ago
    Thanks. The technologies page talks about selection, mainly: (1) either Alexa top 10 million or Tranco top 1 million; (2) only apex domains are counted. It doesn't talk about weighting at all, so coupled with the subdomain policy, a reasonable assumption is that the statistics are not weighted at all. The disclaimer page also makes it clear that they don't analyze anything that requires interactions like signing in. Together with the subdomain policy, I suspect for any business where the landing/marketing site and the core business offering differ in technologies used (which is especially common for SaaS products), they will only pick up the marketing site. They also seem to allude to some sort of webmaster self-reporting mechanism though, not really sure what that means.
    - tored 5y ago
      Yes, it is important to understand the term "website" in this context. The survey does not measure deployed server languages.
jmnicolas 5y ago
I find it funny that as ASP.NET keeps getting better it sees its adoption shrink. I'm surprised by JS low numbers too, I would have thought it was close to PHP.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mitquinn 5y ago
I absolutely love PHP in recent versions. PHP7 and PHP8 have really filled in a couple of the huge gaps in the language.
deleted 5y ago
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AndyMcConachie 5y ago
Proving once again that there are only two kinds of programming languages. Programming languages that no one uses. Programming languages that everyone hates.
ljoshua 5y ago
I think this is most indicative of the frameworks used to power the majority of the sites on the web, rather than the language chosen to power a custom application, and that is an important distinction for our audience. Luckily for the majority sites on the Internet a CMS is exactly what's needed, and very often with more minimalistic custom development (plugins will take care of most of your needs). Thus with WordPress/Magento/Drupal being the heavyweights it's not at all surprising to see the statistics as laid out. What I would love to see is a similar chart focused on bespoke applications, more like the kinds we would consider building for solutions, startups, and companies here in the HN space. I would guess it would probably hew closer to the stats in the TIOBE Index [0], but again one would want to filter specifically for web application development. Now those are some stats that would be very interesting! [0] https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/
robertwt7 5y ago
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 complete, basically we can create anything with it. Side note: not sure what do they mean by websites, does microservices counts? because most backends are talking to other backends these days with many other languages too
- tored 5y ago
  Top 10 millions websites according to Alexa or top 1 million websites according to Tranco, so no micro services.
IceWreck 5y ago
I don't use PHP personally as a developer but most of the things I self host are written in PHP, (NextCloud, BookStack, FreshRSS, RSS-Bridge, etc). Yes there are faster, easier, and more elegant languages but PHP isn't going anywhere.
deleted 5y ago
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zurn 5y ago
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.
ufmace 5y ago
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.
- kreetx 5y ago
  I'd say it's definitely not representative of people writing code: what "code you run" on your website doesn't mean it was you who wrote that code. There are other statistics around the web for language use.
cs702 5y ago
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 https://wordpress.com -- 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.
- gjsman-1000 5y ago
  Em... You are very wrong in your own example. Wikipedia, Facebook, and Pornhub use PHP. Technically though, Facebook uses Hack, a more strictly-typed customized version of PHP for their own uses, but Hack is still mostly compatible with PHP and until recently could process any PHP file directly.
  - cs702 5y ago
    You are right about Wikipedia, Facebook, and PornHub. I was wrong. I corrected my comment. Thank you for pointing it out.
  - TheCoelacanth 5y ago
    30% is much smaller than 79%, isn't it?
gbourne 5y ago
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.
- jonwinstanley 5y ago
  The people who start their company with wordpress aren't programmers. They are entrepreneurs looking to build a website for close to $0. It's only later when they grow they hire a developer and by that point they may be committed to PHP due to the sunk costs.
hollerith 5y ago
I am guessing that market share is defined such that each domain backed by a wordpress instance (wordpress being written in php) is counted as one share, and gmail.com is counted as one share (or worse, because the survey cannot programmmatically determine what language gmail.com is written in, it is not represented at all in the count). I doubt more than 25% of the hours spent by programmers on software that runs on web servers is spent on PHP code.
Oras 5y ago
I suppose a large percentage of this number is related to Wordpress.
marcodiego 5y ago
“Modernity” is no replacement for maturity and mindshare.
gmlamp 5y ago
Does anyone have experiences with the HHVM stack? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HHVM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HHVM It looks interesting to me since it is written in PHP, C++, OCaml and Rust.
EastSmith 5y ago
As a PHP data point, here is Automattic's own statement on a Techmeme homepage in a job ad unit: "42% down, 58% to go".
martincmartin 5y ago
How much is Hack used outside of Facebook? Why isn't it used more, given the popularity of PHP?
tossaway9000 5y ago
We keep "trying" to rewrite a legacy application, and said rewrite keeps failing, then we end up with what we tried to avoid in the first place: A Frankenstein one-off for some specific project. A lot of people sing the praise of everything being type safe, but I think the dynamic typing of Php and its synchronous nature are what make it so productive. Also, at least compared to its C# Frankenstein cousin, uses a fraction of the resources to do MORE work, that still amazes me TBH...
chimen 5y ago
I would put wordpress on that graph just to see how much it pulls by itself
btbuildem 5y ago
I like seeing trace amounts of Erlang on there! I've been using YAWS as my web back-end for work projects, and a lot of my co-workers either raise an eyebrow or straight-up balk at it. Fair enough, it's pretty obscure, and the syntax isn't super friendly. But then I watch them endlessly upgrade libraries, maintain toolchains, deal with exploits, etc etc, while my code sits on decades-old nuke-proof bedrock that no hacker in their right mind would waste time targeting (and likely would find impenetrable had they tried)
continuational 5y ago
So... how many of the sites use an unknown language? Without this stat, all the other numbers are irrelevant, except to tell how many sites leak implementation details unnecessarily.
- tgv 5y ago
  We run a few websites with the backend written in Python or Go. Neither provides information about that; there's only a Server: nginx header (which seems quite unnecessary too).
sam0x17 5y ago
This is fascinating as it goes contrary to the Google Trends data on a number of languages. For example google trends interest in Ruby peaked in like ~2011 and has been on the decline, however this shows that actual usage of ruby in production has been steadily increasing year over year since then and is now second only to ASP.NET and PHP. This suggests that company adoption either doesn't perfectly track with or significantly lags behind community interest (by ~10 years), which is something I think we all know is true but this is the first time I've seen it measured in a meaningful way.
uDontKnowMe 5y ago
I have to point out the obvious, that this chart doesn't pass the smell test and must have done something really wrong to conclude that in 2021, JS and Python power less websites than Scala.
jimbaxter 5y ago
So what's considered the cool stack right now? Being a PHP developer who built my own web app, NannyLogic, that's making money and love it, but also being fairly new to programming, I'm not really aware of what is or isn't cool in hacker circles but I'd be interested to learn new things.
Pensacola 5y ago
ColdFusion is java, so those numbers should be added to the java line instead of broken out.
- Pensacola 5y ago
  Arguably, so is scala.
jefurii 5y ago
Methodology has at least two major flaws. 1- They say they only consider what the root of a domain is using, ignoring subdomains. Speaking for my own org our real work happens in subdomains running Django apps. Our www is just a WordPress site because we don't want to spend cycles writing/maintaining a simple blog engine. 2- For a lot of sites using e.g. Django there wouldn't be an automatic way of determining what language was used.
pbronez 5y ago
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=2.236209345.190202062.1628102352-126161871.1625855113#section-most-popular-technologies-programming-scripting-and-markup-languages https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021?_ga=2.2362093...
- tored 5y ago
  There is nothing really wrong with the methodology, it just that you have to understand what they are measuring and what the definition of a website is. https://w3techs.com/faq https://w3techs.com/faq https://w3techs.com/technologies https://w3techs.com/technologies https://w3techs.com/disclaimer https://w3techs.com/disclaimer They are not measuring cron jobs, mobile apps, services, games, etc, all large sectors within the field of programming. If we combine this survey with the Stack Overflow survey we can conclude that websites are built with PHP in the backend and with JavaScript in the frontend, nothing really chocking. One problem with the Stack Overflow survey is that I'm not sure that the community of more esoteric languages like Erlang even uses Stack Overflow, I guess that is why it is at place 11 for W3Techs and 35 for Stack Overflow.
hsn915 5y ago
Isn't this just a reflection of most websites running wordpress?
amai 5y ago
Needs a logarithmic plot.
peanut_worm 5y ago
I thought Ruby was dying, surprised to see it has so much marketshare still. I’d be interested in seeing this graph with Wordpress excluded

209 points by TicklishTiger 5y ago

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

Majestic121 5y ago
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-frameworks 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 ?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

57844743385 5y ago

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

hexa22 5y ago
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.
- hparadiz 5y ago
  This is why I recommend converting from Ruby to PHP. Costs are way lower and it's easier to find devs.
  - midrus 5y ago
    Sure, and rewriting everything is easy and a piece of cake too
    - hparadiz 5y ago
      I've been in a situation before where a company was being quoted 20k for one new system build out by an outside agency to work on their ruby site. They wanted an events page with an admin back end. Instead I hired a Junior PHP dev for them making 75/year who converted the entire existing site in 8 weeks and then proceeded to build the same events functionality for a fraction of the cost and then went onto building the wish list of features they wanted over the next year. If they went with the outside agency they'd have spent 300k and probably not even had a good outcome. This was 10 years ago though so inflate everything I said across the board by 25%.
thehappypm 5y ago
New job postings is a good metric for new web sites, but new sites are a tiny fraction of the total internet.
- moystard 5y ago
  Existing companies still need to hire, and the job market is a good reflection of what technologies are in-demand at any given moment.
- scbrg 5y ago
  I've also heard that you can use computers for other things than displaying web sites, but that might just be a rumor :)
unnouinceput 5y ago
A search, right now, on Upwork does the following: PHP - 12316 jobs Ruby - 1175 jobs Java - 5902 jobs Python - 10051 jobs .NET - 2353 jobs Adding a few of the others: C# - 2562 jobs (I suspect those .NET also can be interchanged with C#) C++ - 1711 jobs Go - 3925 jobs Rust - 382 jobs Feel free to double check my results. Like it or not, Upwork is the largest freelancer site.
- oefrha 5y ago
  Upwork also skews towards one-off gigs for businesses serving a tiny audience, often with <=$100 pay. The average full-time, long-term job offering could be equivalent to maybe 50 average Upwork jobs (just a ballpark number I pulled out of nowhere).
  - unnouinceput 5y ago
    And let's assume your pulled from nowhere ballpark number would be true. Even then the percentage of those jobs would still be in favor for PHP, with PHP being an order of magnitude higher than Ruby
- joelbluminator 5y ago
  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.
  - unnouinceput 5y ago
    Anecdotal search? How so, please explain.
    - joelbluminator 5y ago
      You're searching in one website which is intended for freelancers, that's not exactly a good representation of the software industry.

BoumTAC 5y ago

As the famous adage say: There are people who write blog post and there are people who write code.

BiteCode_dev 5y ago

I wonder if this is because the report includes wordpress web sites.

christophilus 5y ago
Why wouldn’t it?
- tyingq 5y ago
  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.
  - daneel_w 5y ago
    The article emphasizes "server-side", which to me translates into "the most deployed..."
    - BiteCode_dev 5y ago
      Yes, I don't say it's wrong, I'm just curious.
  - NovemberWhiskey 5y ago
    ... 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.
- lasereyes136 5y ago

clone1018 5y ago

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?".

adventured 5y ago
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.
- astura 5y ago
  It's not just PHP, turning off X-Powered-By (or similar) is part of any server hardening standard for any language I've ever seen (and implemented).
WesolyKubeczek 5y ago
Still, you can use it to gauge PHP to non-PHP. And there is an unknown percentage of PHP sites which turn this header off.
- acdha 5y ago
  Your second sentence is why the first is unreliable: in particular, advertising server software and versions will get you flagged by most security auditors so the PHP sites which don't advertise will often be the largest and/or most interesting — for example, neither Etsy nor Wikipedia advertise that header.
  - WesolyKubeczek 5y ago
    Still, if you change "78%" to "at least 78%", it's impressive nonetheless.

easton 5y ago

I'm curious how this changes if you remove PHP being used for WordPress (where the people using it probably didn't choose it). Do lots of companies still choose PHP for brand new projects? I know Facebook has a dialect they still use, but you don't hear much about it anymore.

0x0nyandesu 5y ago
PHP is my bread and butter. Yes there are still shops that use it. It doesn't really deserve the bad rap.
- qsort 5y ago
  As a Java dev I feel you. PHP, Java are both languages that used to be god-awful, but they have evolved massively in the past decade and most of the criticism is outdated.
- WesolyKubeczek 5y ago
  It's bearable since version 7, and unless they make it another Java in version 8 which will make it unbearable again, it's gonna be ok. Kids who want to seem cool have moved on to Go and NodeJS, so PHP is mainly left with people who got some experience and mostly know what they are doing, save for those who really just twiddle Wordpress until it sort of appears to do what they want it to do. I suspect that PHP's ultimate fate is to become another Perl — a quite mature platform with very few people tending to it, obscure, with a community of very expensive veteran programmers.
  - deweller 5y ago
    PHP 8 has been out since November. It adds some typing but everything is optional. PHP has always been a loosely typed language. Converting to a strongly typed language would against the grain of the entire culture and history of PHP. https://www.php.net/supported-versions.php https://www.php.net/supported-versions.php https://www.php.net/releases/8.0/en.php https://www.php.net/releases/8.0/en.php
  - 5y ago

57844743385 5y ago

Lies, damn lies and statistics.

draw_down 5y ago

No, I’m pretty sure it’s C. Your PHP code is nice and all, but nothing happens with it until C does its thing.

qsort 5y ago

How did Ruby increase that much lately? Also, I'm surprised Python isn't more popular. 1% is (comparatively) tiny for a language that popular.

formerly_proven 5y ago
How would you tell a given page was generated by some Python or Ruby webframework? There aren't any headers these use (like PHP usually does), so you'd have to look for more subtle cues like the name of session cookies or perhaps patterns in the way static files are addressed. The same goes for pretty much everything on that list which isn't PHP or .NET.
- qsort 5y ago
  Yes, that's a good point. The "[...] of all the websites whose server-side programming language we know" clause changes the interpretation dramatically.
- daneel_w 5y ago
  It swings that way for PHP as well. Several large PHP frameworks don't report PHP in the literal sense in the response headers.
julienpalard 5y ago
I bet most Python web frameworks (just checked with Django) don't report being Python (or even the said framework) in HTTP headers, so it can't be counted. Another point of data could be: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=php%2Cpython%2Cdjango%2Cwordpress https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=php%2Cpython%...
herbst 5y ago
The ruby eco system is growing and majoring every day. It's just not cool anymore :)
qaq 5y ago
Discourse sites ?

inovica 5y ago

This is probably correct and a lot of software still uses PHP. Wordpress being one of the huge ones. I actually see a lot of people still developing in PHP, though my own involvement finished years ago. I think because we sometimes operate in a bubble, it's always a surprise to see this

daneel_w 5y ago

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.

rich_sasha 5y ago
It sure resonated with me, the occasional PHP user. Though I get that you can poke holes in anything.
- tialaramex 5y ago
  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.
  - daneel_w 5y ago
    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.
    - tialaramex 5y ago
      > 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.

jegea 5y ago

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, Ruby (my personal interest, here) has been steadily gaining share in that chart year over year, despite not being "cool" anymore. If you ask me, it's good to have a dose a reality from time to time!

smoldesu 5y ago
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.
- api 5y ago
  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.
  - heurisko 5y ago
    Modern PHP application development doesn't really use the "deploy PHP scripts to a folder" model any more. The more likely scenario is that a framework with a front controller is used, which is invoked by php-fpm, proxied by nginx. It's easy enough to do, though.
    - lowercased 5y ago
      The bulk of what I do is still, essentially, 'deploy to a folder'. There's some build steps, and a symlink swap from old to new, but that's still what it's doing. And I can still go edit a single file in a folder some place if I need to test/debug something. That's rare, but there are times when production is the only place an issue shows up (or... the only place you can replicate it - usually you can figure out enough from that to replicate locally later).

malf 5y ago

How is this measured?

johntdaly 5y ago

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 can work yourself through). The statistics are a bit misleading though. Just because 80% of the sites run PHP in some way doesn’t mean there are that many Jobs. A lot of the work with PHP world is not necessarily going to be PHP work (a lot of HTML, JavaScript and Plugin configuration) and there is complexity in learning your way around a system well enough to build plugins. The jump from beginner to expert has become harder for a new PHP programmer because the real programming is hidden behind a wall of already existing code that just needs to be installed, configured and customized. I’m glad I got out when I did because I get to actually program APIs and Single Page Apps rather than just being a glorified PHP webpage mechanic.

mathattack 5y ago
Good point on jobs vs existing code base. It’s kind of like radio still has a lot of listeners but the amount of new stations isn’t rising as dramatically as other mediums.
dncornholio 5y ago
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.
- johntdaly 5y ago
  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 working on them. When I got into WordPress back then It was NEW. When I got in to jQuery it had 3% market share and it was the underdog. A lot of the arguments you might be sick of hearing about, well back then they where valid.

beached_whale 5y ago

I wonder how much of that is wordpress, they have a really large user base and run on php

mjburgess 5y ago

We should distinguish between applications developed in PHP, from installations of apps which happen to be developed in PHP. I suspect one would see the former drop off a cliff, whilst the latter will always be quite high -- due to first-mover effects.

manaskarekar 5y ago

Offish-topic: PHP docs are awesome.

jonwinstanley 5y ago
Agreed, having user contributions of example code underneath is often really helpful and something I miss when looking up other languages

cushychicken 5y ago

PHP is still by far the most used server-side language ...due to WordPress, I'm guessing.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

cardanome 5y ago

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 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.

jrwr 5y ago
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.
- pineconewarrior 5y ago
  Yes! PHP is great for this. I often use it for things that people might use Python for, too, except on the web.
qsort 5y ago
> Probably needs some new languages with slightly different syntax I used to toy around with Haxe: https://haxe.org/ 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.
- cardanome 5y ago
  I am regularly stumbling upon Haxe. It seems like a well designed language but like you I never yet found a use case. Though it seems to be also great for game dev. The show case of games written in Haxe is quite impressive: https://haxe.org/use-cases/games/ https://haxe.org/use-cases/games/

jl6 5y ago

Rephrased: 78.9% of sites that expose implementation details of their backend run PHP. Or claim to.

cm2187 5y ago

It is interesting that asp.net has been falling like a rock despite .net core. Any idea why?

jameshart 5y ago

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...)

gabereiser 5y ago

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.

ychompinator 5y ago
My thoughts exactly.

BusTrainBus 5y ago

Nobody tell Jeff Attwood, he chose a complex tech stack for Discourse 10 years ago, with the explicit aim that it would be so easy and powerful that the “PHP virus” would be defeated.

streamofdigits 5y ago

Some ecosystems go extinct but others stabilize for long periods and might surge again under the right conditions. Python was around for decades before it became a good fit for data science / machine learning and interest in the language exploded. Php seems to be in such a stable phase, fixing old issues, modernizing and powering real apps used everywhere. Wordpress is being mentioned, but don't forget that wikipedia / mediawiki is also php and what those folks are doing with wikidata is ground breaking. There are plenty of scenarios in which php could grow again, e.g widespread decentralization using nextcloud, wikidata or similar.

aynyc 5y ago

How do they measure it? I can't seem to find their method.

boringg 5y ago

How is this state even determined? If we exclude Facebook & Wikipedia how much market share is left after that? I ask as the statistic seems to be projecting that it is the most popular amongst people, but it feels like it is a legacy language. Maybe adding in how much new server unrelated to the legacy apps are written in PHP would be a good contrast.

dsego 5y ago

PHP has quite a few things going for it. File-system based routing before it was cool. Each request cycle is isolated, so an error in your script won't bring down the whole server. With shared hosting, you get something very similar to serverless functions today. The language was created with embedding tags from the start, so there is no need to build or use 3rd party template parser. Everything outside of php tags just gets outputted as strings, very similar to JSX. The biggest downside is (was?) C-style file includes, instead of packages.

FormFollowsFunc 5y ago

Outside of Wordpress, I don't think the PHP ecosystem is in a great state. I worked with it recently and the availability of 3rd party libraries wasn't great. A lot of them were abandoned. Python and JavaScript have healthier ecosystems.

jonwinstanley 5y ago
Symfony is very healthy plus there are a load of packages around Laravel and Symfony that can be used independently

blodkorv 5y ago

I use php for pretty much everything. Php has a lot going for it, there are tonnes of developers who knows the ecosystem. It works on every OS/plattform there is. The performance is decent. Any systadmin out there knows how to admin an php application. The tooling is mature and you are not bound to any specific editor or ide. For me its the perfect language.

oliwarner 5y ago

The last few server-side languages I've used don't use extensions or publish a header banner. In many cases it's just not possible to tell what's running. w3techs admit as much in their disclaimer. The data and conclusions from it are junk. > In order to obtain any information from websites, we rely on the websites themselves, their owners or their webmasters to provide such information. Some websites are more open to sharing this type of information than others. Some technologies may provide more means to reveal information about their usage than others.

jjice 5y ago

I'm a recent grad and my job is working with PHP. I had always heard and told jokes about PHP being old and washed up (my favorite what that it stands for "Pre Historic Programming"). Then I started using PHP. Some quirks I didn't like at first, and some I still don't love, but it really is a solid language. Funniest part is that I'm using 5.6 (we're working on migrating to 8). I'm so excited to get some of the more modern features too. It really is a solid language for web programming. If I were to work on a large scale web project on my own though, I'd probably still choose JS, Python, or Go, but PHP is a language that's won my respect.

oefrha 5y ago

I don’t even know what market share / usage statistics means here. The FAQ doesn’t seem to answer the question and the actual report is behind an order form. So: how is it calculated? Is google.com weighted the same as mom-and-pop-restaurant-near-you.com? If not, how are they weighted respectively? Of course there’s also the problem of identifying the language without an x-powered-by or similar signal, which several other commenters pointed out.

tored 5y ago
These two pages provides some more information on the subject. https://w3techs.com/technologies https://w3techs.com/technologies https://w3techs.com/disclaimer https://w3techs.com/disclaimer
- oefrha 5y ago
  Thanks. The technologies page talks about selection, mainly: (1) either Alexa top 10 million or Tranco top 1 million; (2) only apex domains are counted. It doesn't talk about weighting at all, so coupled with the subdomain policy, a reasonable assumption is that the statistics are not weighted at all. The disclaimer page also makes it clear that they don't analyze anything that requires interactions like signing in. Together with the subdomain policy, I suspect for any business where the landing/marketing site and the core business offering differ in technologies used (which is especially common for SaaS products), they will only pick up the marketing site. They also seem to allude to some sort of webmaster self-reporting mechanism though, not really sure what that means.
  - tored 5y ago
    Yes, it is important to understand the term "website" in this context. The survey does not measure deployed server languages.

jmnicolas 5y ago

I find it funny that as ASP.NET keeps getting better it sees its adoption shrink. I'm surprised by JS low numbers too, I would have thought it was close to PHP.

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mitquinn 5y ago

I absolutely love PHP in recent versions. PHP7 and PHP8 have really filled in a couple of the huge gaps in the language.

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AndyMcConachie 5y ago

Proving once again that there are only two kinds of programming languages. Programming languages that no one uses. Programming languages that everyone hates.

ljoshua 5y ago

I think this is most indicative of the frameworks used to power the majority of the sites on the web, rather than the language chosen to power a custom application, and that is an important distinction for our audience. Luckily for the majority sites on the Internet a CMS is exactly what's needed, and very often with more minimalistic custom development (plugins will take care of most of your needs). Thus with WordPress/Magento/Drupal being the heavyweights it's not at all surprising to see the statistics as laid out. What I would love to see is a similar chart focused on bespoke applications, more like the kinds we would consider building for solutions, startups, and companies here in the HN space. I would guess it would probably hew closer to the stats in the TIOBE Index [0], but again one would want to filter specifically for web application development. Now those are some stats that would be very interesting! [0] https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/ https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

robertwt7 5y ago

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 complete, basically we can create anything with it. Side note: not sure what do they mean by websites, does microservices counts? because most backends are talking to other backends these days with many other languages too

tored 5y ago
Top 10 millions websites according to Alexa or top 1 million websites according to Tranco, so no micro services.

IceWreck 5y ago

I don't use PHP personally as a developer but most of the things I self host are written in PHP, (NextCloud, BookStack, FreshRSS, RSS-Bridge, etc). Yes there are faster, easier, and more elegant languages but PHP isn't going anywhere.

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zurn 5y ago

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.

ufmace 5y ago

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.

kreetx 5y ago
I'd say it's definitely not representative of people writing code: what "code you run" on your website doesn't mean it was you who wrote that code. There are other statistics around the web for language use.

cs702 5y ago

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 https://wordpress.com -- 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.

gjsman-1000 5y ago
Em... You are very wrong in your own example. Wikipedia, Facebook, and Pornhub use PHP. Technically though, Facebook uses Hack, a more strictly-typed customized version of PHP for their own uses, but Hack is still mostly compatible with PHP and until recently could process any PHP file directly.
- cs702 5y ago
  You are right about Wikipedia, Facebook, and PornHub. I was wrong. I corrected my comment. Thank you for pointing it out.
- TheCoelacanth 5y ago
  30% is much smaller than 79%, isn't it?

gbourne 5y ago

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.

jonwinstanley 5y ago
The people who start their company with wordpress aren't programmers. They are entrepreneurs looking to build a website for close to $0. It's only later when they grow they hire a developer and by that point they may be committed to PHP due to the sunk costs.

hollerith 5y ago

I am guessing that market share is defined such that each domain backed by a wordpress instance (wordpress being written in php) is counted as one share, and gmail.com is counted as one share (or worse, because the survey cannot programmmatically determine what language gmail.com is written in, it is not represented at all in the count). I doubt more than 25% of the hours spent by programmers on software that runs on web servers is spent on PHP code.

Oras 5y ago

I suppose a large percentage of this number is related to Wordpress.

marcodiego 5y ago

“Modernity” is no replacement for maturity and mindshare.

gmlamp 5y ago

Does anyone have experiences with the HHVM stack? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HHVM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HHVM It looks interesting to me since it is written in PHP, C++, OCaml and Rust.

EastSmith 5y ago

As a PHP data point, here is Automattic's own statement on a Techmeme homepage in a job ad unit: "42% down, 58% to go".

martincmartin 5y ago

How much is Hack used outside of Facebook? Why isn't it used more, given the popularity of PHP?

tossaway9000 5y ago

We keep "trying" to rewrite a legacy application, and said rewrite keeps failing, then we end up with what we tried to avoid in the first place: A Frankenstein one-off for some specific project. A lot of people sing the praise of everything being type safe, but I think the dynamic typing of Php and its synchronous nature are what make it so productive. Also, at least compared to its C# Frankenstein cousin, uses a fraction of the resources to do MORE work, that still amazes me TBH...

chimen 5y ago

I would put wordpress on that graph just to see how much it pulls by itself

btbuildem 5y ago

I like seeing trace amounts of Erlang on there! I've been using YAWS as my web back-end for work projects, and a lot of my co-workers either raise an eyebrow or straight-up balk at it. Fair enough, it's pretty obscure, and the syntax isn't super friendly. But then I watch them endlessly upgrade libraries, maintain toolchains, deal with exploits, etc etc, while my code sits on decades-old nuke-proof bedrock that no hacker in their right mind would waste time targeting (and likely would find impenetrable had they tried)

continuational 5y ago

So... how many of the sites use an unknown language? Without this stat, all the other numbers are irrelevant, except to tell how many sites leak implementation details unnecessarily.

tgv 5y ago
We run a few websites with the backend written in Python or Go. Neither provides information about that; there's only a Server: nginx header (which seems quite unnecessary too).

sam0x17 5y ago

This is fascinating as it goes contrary to the Google Trends data on a number of languages. For example google trends interest in Ruby peaked in like ~2011 and has been on the decline, however this shows that actual usage of ruby in production has been steadily increasing year over year since then and is now second only to ASP.NET and PHP. This suggests that company adoption either doesn't perfectly track with or significantly lags behind community interest (by ~10 years), which is something I think we all know is true but this is the first time I've seen it measured in a meaningful way.

uDontKnowMe 5y ago

I have to point out the obvious, that this chart doesn't pass the smell test and must have done something really wrong to conclude that in 2021, JS and Python power less websites than Scala.

jimbaxter 5y ago

So what's considered the cool stack right now? Being a PHP developer who built my own web app, NannyLogic, that's making money and love it, but also being fairly new to programming, I'm not really aware of what is or isn't cool in hacker circles but I'd be interested to learn new things.

Pensacola 5y ago

ColdFusion is java, so those numbers should be added to the java line instead of broken out.

Pensacola 5y ago
Arguably, so is scala.

jefurii 5y ago

Methodology has at least two major flaws. 1- They say they only consider what the root of a domain is using, ignoring subdomains. Speaking for my own org our real work happens in subdomains running Django apps. Our www is just a WordPress site because we don't want to spend cycles writing/maintaining a simple blog engine. 2- For a lot of sites using e.g. Django there wouldn't be an automatic way of determining what language was used.

pbronez 5y ago

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=2.236209345.190202062.1628102352-126161871.1625855113#section-most-popular-technologies-programming-scripting-and-markup-languages https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021?_ga=2.2362093...

tored 5y ago
There is nothing really wrong with the methodology, it just that you have to understand what they are measuring and what the definition of a website is. https://w3techs.com/faq https://w3techs.com/faq https://w3techs.com/technologies https://w3techs.com/technologies https://w3techs.com/disclaimer https://w3techs.com/disclaimer They are not measuring cron jobs, mobile apps, services, games, etc, all large sectors within the field of programming. If we combine this survey with the Stack Overflow survey we can conclude that websites are built with PHP in the backend and with JavaScript in the frontend, nothing really chocking. One problem with the Stack Overflow survey is that I'm not sure that the community of more esoteric languages like Erlang even uses Stack Overflow, I guess that is why it is at place 11 for W3Techs and 35 for Stack Overflow.

hsn915 5y ago

Isn't this just a reflection of most websites running wordpress?

amai 5y ago

Needs a logarithmic plot.

peanut_worm 5y ago

I thought Ruby was dying, surprised to see it has so much marketshare still. I’d be interested in seeing this graph with Wordpress excluded