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.
The implication is that WordPress sites don't represent what people are using to build software these days. This may or may not be a valid point of view depending on what you really want to know.
Not the implication is that wordpress is mostly a no code platform, so it would be interesting to have numbers for languages when people need to produce custom code.
Wordpress is just a content management system built on top of php. It would be silly not to include everything that is built in php. Most php developers do not code in raw php (when avoidable). Most modern websites that are custom built tend to be a php framework.
Definitely, most web programmers don’t code directly in the language though. Core library devs will but most others use a framework of some kind that abstracts the developer away from the raw code. This helps speed things up in terms of developing, helps other programmers quickly begin to assist with pre existing projects and also provides standard prebuilt methods for handling authentication, sanitization
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.
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?".
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.
Do you think that's “at least 78% of all sites” or “at least 78% of sites which advertise what they're built with”? The latter case seems more likely and that will distort the numbers massively.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The funny part is we still use Node for various sub tasks like webpack. Soon we'll be adding a unit testing layer to the JavaScript which will run in NodeJS as well. But I might wrap it with our PHP launcher. We'll see.
The thing with PHP is it's very easy to understand in comparison with Perl. When Facebook did a study on which languages take the least amount of time to onboard new hires PHP won every time. It's also why they use their own version of PHP in house (Hack). It's 95% same thing with additional features like async built into their engine.
The bad rap was probably due to older versions. I used to program PHP in a professional setting (quite a while ago) and it basically interchangeable as any other system script (bash) executed by a parent http server process.
The language itself at the time was mostly useful because you could execute a script made of HTML (or anything really) with some embedded magic tags interpreted as PHP instead of the opposite where you had to do some sort of template engine.
Older versions were worse but the current versions still have a lot of cultural baggage around the idea that ignoring errors is great and that's it's helpful to automagically convert data types. Changing that would break a huge amount of code and habit so the community is kind of slow-walking in that direction by deprecating features, adding opt-in config, and using linters to identify likely sources of problems.
I don't disagree that it was useful — especially for having such a simple “upload a file, hit refresh” workflow — but popularity can work against you when it encourages optimizing for easy starts over long-term maintainability and a huge number of people learned dubious habits and aren't quick to switch.
Yeah they do, PHP has a few frameworks like Laravel (inspired by Django iirc) that can be used to work on organized web projects. The nice thing is, you know you can host it online for pennies when you're all done. One of my web hosts has a $8 a year plan for example.
According to the Stack Overflow Developer Survey it's the 11th most used technology, between C and C++ [1]. It's no Java or NodeJS, but it's still widely used.
I just inherited a PHP project that it's a nightmare. It doesn't make any sense. It works on PHP 7.3 but the quality is worse than the old PHP 4 stuff.
It is so easy to write good PHP code nowadays but most devs don't do it. They just go for the old ways, with spaghetti code, no clear architecture, etc, because it just works. They don't have to think, just type. Thats why people hate the language. They see the bad code and they think the language is poorly designed.
These days if you're not using PSR4 configured auto loading with all your code in the src or tests directory and a separate public folder then you're not really qualified to work on PHP at a professional level.
I highly encourage using this template for all new projects
I just had my worst PHP dev experience in 5 years of coding. Literally. I just had to leave the office. I'm on my way home and still feel fatigued.
The project not only doesn't use composer (well, it does now because I needed some components) but it has the same third party components duplicated or triplicated around the application. It looks like they downloaded them Everytime they needed them. Some of them are modified to make them work on newer versions of PHP. And the views and the logic are mixed together in big 4k lines files with no functions. Html, js, PHP, tens of SQL queries on loops, all mixed together.
It's so bad it looks that it was made like this on purpose.
The funny thing is a pretty important project for a pretty important and unique customer.
But there is hope, sometimes it can be better to inherit badly written repetitive & copy-pasted code, rather than badly written abstractions.
Badly written abstractions can be really hard to get out of years later because it tends to be viral all over the project, however when there are no abstractions at all, you can decide them right now, you are in charge. Bit by bit you can unwind this mess to something grander, to your own creation. Good luck. Praying the PHP prayer for you.
I've actually fixed this sort of situation at multiple different companies. Typically I end up getting buy in from management once I have started cause it saves money in the long run.
You start by setting up the standard router for all URLs when the php file doesn't exist. You then setup your router to answer somefile.php or whatever file you want. You then have that route execute your own class. You simply delete the original file and it now loads from your router. You can typically copy/paste the code from the file into a function in a class without any modifications. As you go you can get rid of includes / requires all over the place because now you've got auto loader configured so you can just call code from other files at will.
So then I just repeat this process. Sometimes it takes years but I can typically make a huge dent in most systems in the first few months.
If I don't get buy in I do it anyway for any code I'm asked to work on cause it makes the work better and there's no reason not to do it at that point.
I actually kind of envy you. I enjoy refactoring projects like that. You can typically bring that 4k line file you mentioned down to just a few classes and views.
> It's incredibly hard to find good PHP developers.
But... is it much easier to find good devs in any other tech stack? I don't see it, personally. My ruby friends complain it's hard to find ruby devs at all, and harder to find good ones. I do see a lot of JS/node folks that get accepted as 'good', but when the rubber hits the road, the code is often still... meh - cut corners, SO copy/paste, etc.
I see bad node and bad js and bad python... but somehow the languages and stacks get a pass and "it was just a bad developer". But if you see bad PHP, people think "the whole language sucks". Completely inconsistent.
I don't see much python code period, in my day to day work, but what I do see often... doesn't seem demonstrably 'better' by any metrics than run of the mill code from any other stack. But it sometimes comes with some sense of smugness about being 'pythonic'. Standard Java I don't get that sense, but do from some Kotlin advocates I know (usually the ones that are new to programming in general who feel they've found some new magic bullet that will overturn all the bad PHP out there).
Yes, for all the warts of the language, the worst thing about PHP is the illegible code that gets written by someone who glued together a bunch of solutions they found on StackOverflow. The good news is, in my experience, most of those people have moved on to JavaScript.
Note that I enjoy both PHP and JavaScript immensely. But, my God, some of the code that I've seen in both languages...
Yep, only companies that are seeking VC funds have to use "cool" technology to wow investors.
OTOH many bootstrapped or legacy companies pick long established technology to build their products as they are only selling product implementation, not the idea of changing the world or whatnot.
It might also be the client simply wants php. They don't want to pay to maintain anything extremely over-engineered.
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.
Yes, that's a good point. The "[...] of all the websites whose server-side programming language we know" clause changes the interpretation dramatically.
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.
Python deployment continues to be a pain. And it's primary domain is more in the data science/engineering side of things.
Also, in my experience, web devs tend to hate python as much as they do PHP. I've worked at two places so far where python wasn't allowed to be used in web services at all without a Very Good Reason. Choices were Node or Go.
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
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.
You can, but "fractal of bad design" isn't really playing that game. The naming schemes for example. It's not that PHP made a choice and any choice can be criticised, the criticism is that PHP declines to make any choice whatsoever on naming. str-foo strFoo str_foo and FooStr are all defensible choices but having all four in your language is not.
That doesn't make the language less capable or less suitable. That's just an irregularity, causing an itch in certain people's heads. Personal preferences and obsessive-compulsive disorders don't make good arguments.
> Personal preferences and obsessive-compulsive disorders don't make good arguments.
And yet here you are defending PHP and indeed claiming that 'A fractal of bad design' was "particularly popular with" people who haven't written any PHP. Your poor paste is also not a good argument.
It was a completely terrible language and now it's merely mediocre. And yet, it has a particular niche because among other reasons lots of cheap bulk hosts throw in PHP hosting in their default package. It's popular for the same reason all those 1980s kids learned BASIC. BASIC isn't a good programming language, but it is a programming language and there were few other choices available to them.
That is a flawed argument, why? Because BASIC died, so if we follow your analogy PHP would also have died after the initial popularity and then been replaced with something better, but that hasn't happened, thus there are some unique qualities with PHP that makes it hard to replace.
> 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.
I claim so because the article was, and is. It's not me defending the language per se - I have no particular feelings or preferences for PHP - but just setting the record straight in the same way I'd reply to a false or incorrect statement on any other topic. I've seen more than enough unsubstantiated lamenting over PHP from people with little or no experience of the language. The article is more than anything else cited in blasé fashion by commenters who disappear after coughing up a link to the article, failing to follow up with actual solid arguments when asked why PHP would be incapable or unsuited for its tasks. I don't know what paste you are referring to. All of my comments are my own.
> It was a completely terrible language and now it's merely mediocre.
A terrible language is one that just can't get things done without irate jumping through hoops, but that's simply not the case of PHP. That's an objective fact, not a subjective opinion or feeling. While I don't use PHP much these days I still know the language very well, and on that technical and substantial merit I disagree.
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.
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!
It could very well be that PHP is easier to distribute, and gets used in lots of groupware/industry-standard software that's deployed thousands of times across thousands of organizations. I'd imagine that kind of market share piles up after a while.
This is exactly it. Lower friction wins. You can just upload PHP scripts and go, while almost everything else requires many more installation steps or even monstrosities like Kubernetes.
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).
It is not about efficiency , it is about legacy. You can count number of Perl scripts out there and conclude that Perl is still the most popular scripting/devops tool in the world
Kind of true, there are loads of companies that started out as a 1 or 2 person gig with a crappy wordpress site as their MVP, then they take on a full time php developer to make some changes and before you know it they are a few years in and are rebuilding their site in Laravel or Symfony.
In PHP's case it's about WordPress which still being deployed at a very high rate. While the blogging thing isn't that much in focus anymore, WordPress + Divi + WooCommerce is an extremely common stack for setting up eCommerce sites.
An yes, then there's Drupal, Laravel, Symfony, and many others, and they're going strong too. Heck, even Joomla is actively developed even though it's probably small enough today to be considered legacy.
Facebook has done impressive things with PHP, but they are one single entity. WordPress is an entire ecosystem with millions of users, and while Facebook changing their underlying stuff wouldn't be noticed by most, I can assure you there would be a large amount of people who noticed if WordPress decided to switch to ASP.NET or something.
>>You can count number of Perl scripts out there and conclude that Perl is still the most popular scripting/devops tool in the world
Perl is still heavily used. I wrote more than 2K lines just last week, lots of it is throwaway. But hey not many languages make it easy for you to write thousands of lines of throwaway code in hours.
It's still the most useful language in the backend/unix world. This comes from me, who actually writes lots of Python code. But I wouldn't use Python where I use Perl. It would just make me slow and it wouldn't get the job done just as well as Perl.
It's not used as frequently for web dev, or other places where Java is used. But it's very good at what it does. Glue language for the Unix world.
I wrote a bunch of scala code last week to fix problems in a service that we are actively working to replace. I consider this a "legacy" work, nothing to do with technology used
> Perl is still heavily used. I wrote more than 2K lines just last week, lots of it is throwaway.
Agreed. For any one-off (or occasional) task that in any way involves juggling text (which in Unix CLI world is nearly all of it), perl is still the fastest way to get done.
Back in '92 (roughly when I started using perl), its regex support was revolutionary. Today, all languages have decent string handling and regex support. And yet, none is quite so naturally well integrated as in perl. So here 30 years later, if I need to pick apart and recombine text, give me perl.
It's clear that legacy has a pretty strong influence, here, with Wordpress and other standard tools inflating PHP's numbers and Shopify doing the same for Ruby.
But, I'm pretty sure there's plenty of new projects being started nowadays in PHP, Ruby, Java, etc, because they're the most effective tool for the job.
It's just that this is not news. News is yet-another-standard-tool-written-in-rust.
Not always true. Is also about the best tool for the job.
Ex. I had to implement a task that would need to check if an image is similar to other image (not related to porn/csam).
I implemented it with just a few line of PHP and no 100+ package dependencies. How? I run a linux CLI app from inside PHP, super easy.
but, but , you can do it with node too,
- yes, but guess int he past in a node project, soem dev instead of calling ffmpeg directly he npm installed some shit package that called ffmpeg. The package was basic and it did not include or options needed , some other dev would have installed other package to get a new ffmpeg feature, /
I removed all those packages and done it directly.
My point is that we need to use the best tool for the job, if there is a CLI app or Java program/library that solves your problem a developer should present teh client the truth "I can solve your problem using this in 1 day or I can rewrite it in CoolLang and CollFramework and CoolPacakgeManager and CoolTranspilter with 100+ shit dependencies in 1 month. I am afraid many developers are choosing the last option to pad their CV and pump their ego.
I would say is also the ecosystem, PHP has a bit ecosystem and it can always use all the Linux applications (once in a project I integrated PHP with node program puppeteer) so there is no limitation, I miss more features in JS then I miss them in PHP.
Or, maybe developers who choose other languages are also competent professionals who make language/framework choices for good reasons. I have no considered opinion about PHP but one reason I have never used it for a web application backend is because I do a lot of coding that PHP is not well-suited for (high-performance, data intensive) and it is easier to write the web server in the same language I use for everything else.
Also, in general passing untrusted input to shell commands is probably a bad idea. FFmpeg has had many CVEs over the years and taking an upload from a user and piping it to a CLI command is asking for trouble. There are considerations beyond just doing the easiest thing that could possibly work.
>Also, in general passing untrusted input to shell commands is probably a bad idea.
This is why you escape the shell command arguments, but if you blindly npm install a shitty wrapper you probably hit the issue with security issues. Sure review of the dependency would be great but I did not seen many devs doing it, if they would have reviewed the ffmpeg wrapper would have noticed the simplicity and implemented themselves and on top of that learned some new stuff.
>Or, maybe developers who choose other languages are also competent professionals
I did not say that all of node developers are beginners,
I am saying that many developers are not using the right tool for the job but use the cool tool for the job and some developers just blindly npm install shit because this is the only thing they know.
And I can confess I was guilty of this, on a project I propose to use Qt4 over Adobe Air because I was fan Qt and hated Adobe , turned out in the end I was forced to use Adobe Air and I loved it, for what we were doing it was the best tool for the job.
I'm not sure if the Ruby market has ever been better from the pov of devs looking to get hired. There's now a ton of companies with established revenue streams based on Ruby/Rails apps looking to hire, while simultaneously it seems like all the new grads have bought the "Rails is dying!" hype and are looking to invest their time in other techs. Also it seems like all the bootcamp types have moved on from Rails to JS which has only further dried up the incoming developer pipeline.
It doesn't help that despite the impressiveness of the 15 minute blog demo, Rails has always been somewhat difficult to get up and running, particularly on Windows, and it seems like that has only grown worse over time.
The Ruby dev market in Europe is hotter than ever.
Of course, that's in relative terms. It's nowhere near the size of the Java, JS or even Python market size, but demand is strongest than ever and salaries show that, too
Back in 2016 I quit my job as a QA tester to pivot back into my intended career as a software developer. (I had studied CS but got roped into QA as my first job out of school). I sat down and tried to build multiple rails sites as practice. I kept seeing all these Rails positions in the NYC area. I learned a few hard lessons after spending almost two years unemployed and running out my savings:
1. Yes there are lots of Rails jobs but they wanted senior or at least mid level people who learned the deep nitty gritty of Rails at other companies. Few companies were willing to hire you as entry level to work on the job. The few entry level jobs had an ocean of candidates from the bootcamps.
2. I hated looking at Ruby code. Coming from a Java/C# background in college, it just make no sense to me and was ugly. I learned that while there are a billion guides on how to build basic Rails apps, there is very little on doing more complex things. A lot of that knowledge is just spending the time in a job learning a lot of things you can't learn in a book.
Now that I have internalized MVC architecture much better now I have considered going back to Rails to learn what I couldn't comprehend back then but every time I think about it I think about all the horrible nights I was sitting in my basement depressed that I was forcing myself to learn this crap and getting nowhere.
3. I should have dropped it much sooner. Instead I dragged myself in misery day in and day out and entered a deep depression trying to get some position....anything in Ruby/Rails.
4. I even resorted to unsavory tactics such as super fuzzing my resume just to get my foot in the door and ultimately bomb final interviews when asked about the inner working of libraries such as ActiveSupport among others. (Like seriously? Did I have to read all the C source of Ruby to get some basic job?). This fuzzed resume got me in a position where I was getting a 90%+ callback rate and the majority of them led to the final technical interview where I would end up not knowing some Rubyism or having difficulty solving a Ruby question in their existing codebase. Many rejections were due to the fact that while I solved the problem, I didn't solve it in the "Ruby" way. I guess Java/C#/C ruined my brain. I am not worthy of Matz's greatness.
Eventually through sheer dumb luck I managed to get a Angular2+/Flask position at a super large oldschool company only due to my nice manager knowing nothing about the tech stack so he took a chance on me. I thank god for this opportunity as I was maxing out my credit cards trying to survive. This low stress position allowed me to fall in love with Angular and Python and I have never looked back on the horror that is Ruby/Rails.
Thinking about my experience now(and this is subjecting to my experience interviewing at dozens of NYC companies), I noticed Rails being used at all these silly hipster startups that mostly produce garbage anyway. I remember interviewing for this "art studio" that was producing a revolutionary camera system in partnership with an Italian company. The company was just one giant room with round tables where Rails people would be making the web backend that connected with their camera system. They produced the product and got rid of their Rails people a year later. That seems to be the nature of the ecosystem. I saw so much of that in the Rails community.
6. This experience taught me that the community of the language will evidently affect your day to day life and overall career prospects. The niche nature of Rails allowed people who got in super early to make massive mounts of money (hence all the Senior Rails job ads promoting 200K in NYC) but you are mostly stuck working for these "cutting edge" hipster companies and if you don't or want to fit that scene then you are SOL. Likewise Angular and Python attracted some startups as well as enterprise companies due to Microsoft's backing and its excellent library ecosystem...
I suspect these reports also have a good 5-10 years lag time from when a language gets popular, early adopters start using & creating libs, and then finally actual companies start adopting it. From that point there's a lull of development to get the site up, and then a couple of years later everything finally blossoms and the technology shows up on this chart.
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.
There are a lot of WordPress sites. The same site reporting the metrics on PHP also points out that WordPress is 42.5% of all sites [1].
That being said, I know a fair number of PHP developers. None of them are in SV or Seattle. They are in cities many have not heard of. They're all over. Some do public sites. Some do company internal web apps.
Take a project like Symfony, a PHP framework. It's popular but not the most popular. Now, take a look at the download stats for its packages [2]. They are large.
There is software development happening all over the world. A bunch of it is in PHP.
> That being said, I know a fair number of PHP developers. None of them are in SV or Seattle.
> There is software development happening all over the world.
I think this is probably the biggest part of the HN bubble: the idea that "tech hubs" like Silicon Valley make up all, or a supermajority, of tech workers.
I've never even visited the west coast, never lived in a town larger than about 20k people, and frankly never really want to live in a city. Yet I work in tech, and have my entire adult life. (At this point, I am, in fact, primarily a PHP programmer.)
And I'm hardly an exception.
Nearly every company over a handful of employees needs tech support, programming, a website, even servers managed. Many of these will hire internally. Others will turn to contractors—who are also locals.
Silicon Valley, with its high concentration of tech workers and ludicrous salaries, is very much the exception here, and a lot of HNers would do well to remember that, lest they end up looking as out of touch with the real world as Lucille Bluth asking about the price of a banana. [0]
I live in NY, but am not part of the NY "tech scene," because I find they are not particularly welcoming to me. I won’t go where I’m not wanted.
Not really a big deal. I'm pretty cutting edge, on the frontend (native apps for Apple systems, in Swift), but a bit stodgier on the backend (I use PHP). I’m not surprised at all by the survey results.
PHP works great for me. If I need something different (not an issue, so far), I'll hire it in. I'm actually fairly good at big projects in PHP. My code is maintainable and high-quality. It may not be “leet” PHP, but it works well.
There are plenty of custom PHP websites and devs that write them. I, too, still write fully custom (no framework) PHP webapps for customers where I don't expect to be babysitting the app after it's written, and where websockets and real-time interactivity is not necessary.
PHP is great fit for that, because all dependencies are part of the system updates in that case.
Yes - I wrote a messageboard in PHP 18 years ago whilst clutching an OReilly book in my hand.
It's definitely not well coded, but it works.
It's moved servers many times, changed OS, Webserver - and it's now running on my NAS.
I've maybe twice had to spend an afternoon tightening it up due to some PHP change - but broadly been maintenance/issue free.
For at least the last decade I've been pondering re-implementing it in some fancy new language - but as it just keeps working, it slides down the priority list.
That's the "secret" of PHP. It's 20 years later and it just works. Many other front-end development tools and frameworks have come and gone in that timeframe yet PHP persists. Why? Well, I'm not a PHP expert but it sounds like they care about backwards compatibility. You don't have to continually reimplement everything all the time, which both costs money and discourages further investment. There are reasons COBOL is still around 50+ years later.
"because in my experience I haven’t actually seen a single php developer "
With all due respect, that is one hell of a bubble :). Plenty of companies use PHP (not just WordPress) and there are plenty of PHP devs who work with core, symfony, Laravel etc.
PHP is battle tested and even though it has its quirks, you can never go wrong with it if you are looking to build a web application.
P.S: We are hiring web developers for our company and PHP experience is preferred considering our stack.
I worked almost 10 years doing PHP.
Only corporate apps (backoffices/frontoffices/services/batches, monitoring CO2 for train transports, GPS , invoices, train orders, electronic consignment notes ,sso&subscriber management for a magazine, bridges... ), not a single WordPress.
So at some point there were PHP developers and I met many. I lost interest in PHP when the industry moved to REST APIs and SPA though.
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).
I like your description. Mine is that HN is not so much a bubble, but an enclave of highly opiniated feuding camps that just can't stop themselves from having shouting matches with eachother.
Agreed, in fact modern SPA stacks are incredibly inefficient.
And the corporate world move slowly.
And dev cost money. Most websites don't need more, they were fine 10 years ago and still are.
Although I'm not sure we have the whole story. I'm assuming we get high stats because of wordpress, which is not a good indicator of language popularity, but rather of platform popularity.
Hey! I also love PHP and Ruby. I was a fan of Rails until I discovered Laravel and I found it to be similar but better (and much faster). People who bash PHP should take a look at PHP 7/8 and what clean and professional PHP code can look like.
It's a controversial opinion of mine, but many other languages have come and gone since PHP, yet it still dominates. With all the new alternatives nothing has taken over and it shows that stability and mature works better than change when there is not a critical need for it.
Modern languages have also time and time again forsaken the ideal of making development LESS COMPLICATED than prior languages, and this is why they don't take over markets. Creating more abstract languages just to do the same things that PHP, Python, Java, JS, and other "legacy" langs have accomplished (over many years) does not make sense. Too many people get credit for reinventing the wheel these days and it's a distraction from truly game-changing innovation.
Relevant and reliable function resides in a separate lane than innovative new solutions. They shouldn't be hyped and rushed to market as "PHP killers" simply because they generate buzz and new contract money.
And FTR... If you still have to compile code in 2021 prior to running it, you're burning a lot of extra valuable time off your life and away from your family in frustration just to find out that the advice on Stack Overflow was not relevant to your framework's new update, and you'll regret the lost years on your death bed... probably... Sorry, That had to be said... :P
Code compilation has saved me so many headaches that would have otherwise been discovered in production, so I can't say I agree with you there. That said the languages I compile also take 15 seconds so I don't experience that 40 minute compilation times some people have and that would probably sour my experience a bit. The language I'm talking about is Elixir fwiw.
All depends on the nature of your app of course... But I've managed to do pretty accurate simulations with modern tools in Stage environments, and to regularly sync my STAGE and PROD environments on high traffic sites with safer test results... Different strokes I guess.
Really? I hope not. Just because it compiles, doesn't mean it won't panic because of some weird state caused by a race condition buried deep in the code where a lock wasn't held when it was so desperately needed
I write native Apple software (Swift/UI/App/WatchKit), and my server stuff is PHP (and works great).
I like to spend as little time as possible on the backend. I totally admit its not my strong suit, so having a robust, highly-supported, standardized, performative, language like PHP, with a gazillion assistive resources and examples around, is nice. I've been writing stuff in PHP for over 20 years, so I sort of know my way around it.
I'll be expanding my Apple native stuff into the new "pseudo-reactive" realm of SwiftUI, but I don't really plan to keep growing my backend chops. PHP is doing fine for me. If I need anything else, I'll hire the talent.
"Ruby (my personal interest, here) has been steadily gaining share in that chart year over year, despite not being "cool" anymore."
I have a comment from yesterday that is (rightly) sitting at -4 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28501661) that seems relevant: The rise of Ruby on that chart can be directly correlated with the rise of Shopify.
Elsewhere they note that Shopify "accounts" for 3.9% of the top million websites. The bulk of Ruby's increase.
Though I'm suspicious of the accuracy of their numbers. Most modern tech stacks don't announce themselves in the way that PHP did, and they clearly used curated metadata to attribute some major content engines (e.g. Shopify = Ruby, Wordpress = PHP, Wikis = PHP, etc), which means that anything outside of the top identifiable content engines isn't going to have proper attribution.
Further, note that literally any use gets credited. Look at the "popular sites using Shopify" at -
Overwhelmingly they get the shopify/ruby credit for linking to a minimal checkout experience on a subdomain. That seems...incredibly dubious.
Still neat though. But what it really demonstrates is that product wins, not technology. Wordpress is clearly a winning product. Shopify is a winning product.
Laravel on PHP 8, especially with a few add-ons like Tailwind, Tailwind UI, and Livewire (for SPA-like stuff) is so efficient with so little code it's hardly funny.
I'm convinced if you are a typical medium-sized business trying to recreate that technology with Node, Express, React, and a billion NPM packages, your are doing things the unnecessarily hard way.
Well don't forget the biases that are encoded in these percentages (I'm presuming these stats are not normalized by throughput, or revenue). A ton of these websites are basically "some small-time coding contractor is contracted to build a site for X commerce business that "needs a website"" (think: the pizzeria down the corner, or the dry cleaners). If there's even any interactivity at all, it needs to be cookie-cutter. Probably there are small firms and individuals that are responsible for hundreds of these, and some medium sized firms that are responsible for thousands. Copy, paste, customize, check off with contractee, publish.
It might be 'bias', but if it was as easy to do this in other stacks, wouldn't we see hundreds of thousands of cookie-cutter/copy/paste sites in, say, .net? Or rails? Or node? That this is 'easy' with a PHP base speaks to the fact that many other stacks seemingly ignore the needs of many markets.
I seem to recall a perl CMS - was is movable type? - that required mod_perl. This certainly gave it a perf boost against other CMS, but the overhead in setting up and maintaining a mod_perl system, and dealing with making code updates, was huge compared to PHP. I think these qualities continually get overlooked, decades on.
But also consider that most of these projects are cost centers. Hn very much biases for people who are using tech as revenue (or at least core-value, in the case of not-necessairly-for-profit projects) props. It's understandable that the communities and tools should be orthogonal.
When interviewing developers, I always ask about their experience in handling sites large enough to comprise a farm, not just a single server. In all my years of searching, I've only ever come across one developer with such experience.
But here on HN, it makes it look like the multiple load balanced web and app servers we've got across multiple tiers, not to mention Docker and k8s, are on the small side.
There's definitely a big difference between those conversing here and "the unwashed masses".
I'm tempted to go even further and guess the truth is that even many of todays actual cloud deployments could probably have been better served by two to 7 beefy servers - or even a couple of virtul servers in many cases.
Yeah, but who knows how many of those are “ghost ships” that were built for local businesses over 5-10 years ago, were never touched since, never got security updates, and now load slowly because there’s a bitcoin miner churning away in a subprocess because they got hacked 2 years ago.
To make a slightly problematic, somewhat poor taste analogy: 50% of the worlds houses (not a real stat, I’m lazy) have sheet metal roofs. All of the following are likely true:
- sheet metal roofs are wayyyy better than nothing for keeping the rain out. If you can’t afford anything else, definitely use them.
- Most people with sheet metal roofs would probably prefer something else, and would choose something else if the option was on the table.
- The prevalence of sheet metal roofs as a roofing material says less about sheet metal’s awesomeness as a roof than it does about factors that have little to do with sheet metal roofs (like global inequality).
- If you talk to construction workers in developed countries, they’d grant you that sheet metal roofing is quite prevalent worldwide, but they’re more interested in other materials and techniques that provide real substantial benefits.
Metal roofs last much longer than asphalt shingle roofs and are considered to be a superior material despite being a “legacy” roof. Asphalt shingle roofs dominate in the US simply due to cost and more roofers being familiar with the material.
HN mostly has people making web applications. These statistics are about web sites. There is a bit of a blurry line between the two, but you for the most part don't hire a software developer to make a web site.
PHP has a huge market share in web sites, but much less in web apps.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I was using MooTools before jQuery ever was a thing but you don't hear me complaining about PHP. I love PHP and enjoy working on it each and every day.
It's legacy is a hell I agree but quite irrelevant and getting old.
You can love and enjoy PHP as much as you want, that is ok. I don’t, I’m gone and I wont be back and that should be ok too. It is not meant as a personal attack. Hell, I have a lot of bad stuff to say about JavaScript too and right now I’m writing 100% JavaScript in the frontend and the backend!
You know the saying “There are two types of programming languages, the ones you love and the ones you use”. That sort of thing. AND it still doesn’t invalidate my points:
1) PHP is relevant because of the software already written in it and that will not just get rewritten because PHP isn’t HOT anymore.
2) If you are a new PHP developer you are most likely going to be shoved into a job that has more to do with configuring, maintaining and customizing those preexisting systems.
3) Because of that getting from being a beginner PHP dev to an expert PHP dev is going to be harder than it should be.
4) There are going to be less PHP jobs in proportion to its usage out there because so many of the PHP jobs fall into the configuring, maintaining and customizing schema in comparison to other languages.
I am old also, and I have maintained some PHP code for about 18+ years now. From PHP 4 to PHP 7.4.
The changes and improvements are dramatic and wonderful. Improvements in speed, security, error processing, functionality/integration with databases, Composer, etc...
While I am not suggesting you go back to PHP, but things are simply not the same anymore.
I know it is not the same anymore. It doesn’t invalidate my experience from back then and the reason I left the community. And to get a response along the line that, I don’t get to have an opinion because the stuff I worked on was “OLD SHIT” is insulting.
The reason for that though is that it has changed so much that your old experience is hardly relevant because it is so different now. The Old PHP world and the New PHP world are hardly recognizable as the same thing.
1) Would you argue that point with WordPress too? It still looks a lot like the old PHP and it is a big part of those nearly 80% market share.
2) Part of my point was PHP, regardless of what you may think of it, is not bad enough that any of that code needs a rewrite. Still PHP people concentrate on me not liking PHP and argue with me about that and nothing else. Why is the reflex in the PHP community to do this so strong?
I would keep WordPress and PHP entirely separate in my mind. WordPress is... blegh. PHP and Laravel is a totally different story.
As for the reflex... PHP has had this bad reputation for so long, that most PHP programmers (IMHO, just an opinion!) feel looked down-on for using what is actually a pretty decent system now. Viewed as inferior programmers for preferring it.
It sounds like you may be taking this personally, that is not my intent.
I think you should realize that when someone expresses an experience people often times read it as warning.
And your experience sharing (as a warning to others) is not useful to the current state. And therefore could be considered damaging to other people's perspective without a counter "experience" being shared.
I have my experience and the fact that it aligns perfectly with yours up until you stopped using PHP should be appreciated for what it is.
Nextcloud won’t change to the new, go ownCloud codebase. There are two separate and competing companies behind each product now. Nextcloud also has client side encryption as a commercial add-on, that sort of is a big deal.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> "I really don't get why PHP is not more liked in hacker circles"
To me PHP is an ugly language, with heaps of quirks and weird api's. The way it mixes markup and logic is gross.
That being said, I do like some parts of it. The way you compose pages by just writing "include" is nice. The way the server spins up processes for every request like a micro-service is nice.
PHP does have an elegant simplicity that many languages and frameworks lack these days...
We don't do that any more. You separate logic and view like in any other language.
In fact some people don't even use PHP for templating anymore but a domain specific language. (Though sometimes having a fully features programming language for templating can be nice so jury is still out.)
Honestly I am more grossed out with the stuff that some modern frontend frameworks are doing these days, where there is not separation of styling, markup and logic anymore with that thing that is like html but not totally html. I see the advantages but not sure how this will turn out in the long run.
> To me PHP is an ugly language, with heaps of quirks and weird api's. The way it mixes markup and logic is gross.
Kind of tangential, but I've found a similar thing in the React framework: After all these years working towards splitting UI with logic, React asks me to hardcode the graphical components in a return (<module1></module1><module2></module2>) function. It is something I just cannot grok. I prefer frameworks that let you separate the UI elements from the logic that drives them.
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%.
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).
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
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.
I know that. What I meant is how is "anecdotal" my search. That is skewed towards freelancing, that's true, but anecdotal? It implies is a joking of a search, which is definitely not. Your LinkedIn search is skewed towards US, but I don't call it anecdotal!
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...)
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.
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.
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.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 266 ms ] threadWhich I suppose you could argue, since it's likely passing through apache/nginx, which is fronting wordpress. So maybe 'C' is the most used.
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.
"Anyone" can make a website with WordPress, but how many WordPress websites have programmers writing code for the website?
Most wordpress freelancers don't code, they configure or install plugins. Somebody using rail, django or laravel is going to code.
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?".
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.
https://www.php.net/supported-versions.php https://www.php.net/releases/8.0/en.php
The thing with PHP is it's very easy to understand in comparison with Perl. When Facebook did a study on which languages take the least amount of time to onboard new hires PHP won every time. It's also why they use their own version of PHP in house (Hack). It's 95% same thing with additional features like async built into their engine.
The language itself at the time was mostly useful because you could execute a script made of HTML (or anything really) with some embedded magic tags interpreted as PHP instead of the opposite where you had to do some sort of template engine.
I don't disagree that it was useful — especially for having such a simple “upload a file, hit refresh” workflow — but popularity can work against you when it encourages optimizing for easy starts over long-term maintainability and a huge number of people learned dubious habits and aren't quick to switch.
1: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#technology
Only developers complain about PHP. And even that isn't really warranted anymore as PHP has grown leaps & bounds since most of the hate.
I just inherited a PHP project that it's a nightmare. It doesn't make any sense. It works on PHP 7.3 but the quality is worse than the old PHP 4 stuff.
It is so easy to write good PHP code nowadays but most devs don't do it. They just go for the old ways, with spaghetti code, no clear architecture, etc, because it just works. They don't have to think, just type. Thats why people hate the language. They see the bad code and they think the language is poorly designed.
I highly encourage using this template for all new projects
https://github.com/thephpleague/skeleton
The project not only doesn't use composer (well, it does now because I needed some components) but it has the same third party components duplicated or triplicated around the application. It looks like they downloaded them Everytime they needed them. Some of them are modified to make them work on newer versions of PHP. And the views and the logic are mixed together in big 4k lines files with no functions. Html, js, PHP, tens of SQL queries on loops, all mixed together.
It's so bad it looks that it was made like this on purpose.
The funny thing is a pretty important project for a pretty important and unique customer.
Just want to nuke everything to oblivion.
But there is hope, sometimes it can be better to inherit badly written repetitive & copy-pasted code, rather than badly written abstractions.
Badly written abstractions can be really hard to get out of years later because it tends to be viral all over the project, however when there are no abstractions at all, you can decide them right now, you are in charge. Bit by bit you can unwind this mess to something grander, to your own creation. Good luck. Praying the PHP prayer for you.
For the last couple weeks I've been thinking I should look for a new jobs as it looks there's no future here.
You start by setting up the standard router for all URLs when the php file doesn't exist. You then setup your router to answer somefile.php or whatever file you want. You then have that route execute your own class. You simply delete the original file and it now loads from your router. You can typically copy/paste the code from the file into a function in a class without any modifications. As you go you can get rid of includes / requires all over the place because now you've got auto loader configured so you can just call code from other files at will.
So then I just repeat this process. Sometimes it takes years but I can typically make a huge dent in most systems in the first few months.
If I don't get buy in I do it anyway for any code I'm asked to work on cause it makes the work better and there's no reason not to do it at that point.
I actually kind of envy you. I enjoy refactoring projects like that. You can typically bring that 4k line file you mentioned down to just a few classes and views.
But... is it much easier to find good devs in any other tech stack? I don't see it, personally. My ruby friends complain it's hard to find ruby devs at all, and harder to find good ones. I do see a lot of JS/node folks that get accepted as 'good', but when the rubber hits the road, the code is often still... meh - cut corners, SO copy/paste, etc.
I see bad node and bad js and bad python... but somehow the languages and stacks get a pass and "it was just a bad developer". But if you see bad PHP, people think "the whole language sucks". Completely inconsistent.
Compare that with deploying a hello word website in python, java or elixir.
Note that I enjoy both PHP and JavaScript immensely. But, my God, some of the code that I've seen in both languages...
PHP 8 for our API, JS for the app that consumes it - sharing code both server-side and client-side.
It works really well for us.
Development on a modern version of PHP with a framework like Symfony or Laravel is so very different to development on old PHP5 versions.
edit: PHP 7.x and 8 let you do things like:
- no automatic type conversions
- typed function parameters and return types
- typed object properties
- named parameters
All of these are little niceties but they add up to making it fantastically easier to avoid stupid mistakes that used to be common with PHP.
OTOH many bootstrapped or legacy companies pick long established technology to build their products as they are only selling product implementation, not the idea of changing the world or whatnot.
It might also be the client simply wants php. They don't want to pay to maintain anything extremely over-engineered.
Your PHP code is nice and all, but nothing happens with it until C does its thing.
Also, I'm surprised Python isn't more popular. 1% is (comparatively) tiny for a language that popular.
The same goes for pretty much everything on that list which isn't PHP or .NET.
Another point of data could be: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/trends?tags=php%2Cpython%...
The next big thing there is Typescript.
Also, in my experience, web devs tend to hate python as much as they do PHP. I've worked at two places so far where python wasn't allowed to be used in web services at all without a Very Good Reason. Choices were Node or Go.
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.
I claim so because the article was, and is. It's not me defending the language per se - I have no particular feelings or preferences for PHP - but just setting the record straight in the same way I'd reply to a false or incorrect statement on any other topic. I've seen more than enough unsubstantiated lamenting over PHP from people with little or no experience of the language. The article is more than anything else cited in blasé fashion by commenters who disappear after coughing up a link to the article, failing to follow up with actual solid arguments when asked why PHP would be incapable or unsuited for its tasks. I don't know what paste you are referring to. All of my comments are my own.
> It was a completely terrible language and now it's merely mediocre.
A terrible language is one that just can't get things done without irate jumping through hoops, but that's simply not the case of PHP. That's an objective fact, not a subjective opinion or feeling. While I don't use PHP much these days I still know the language very well, and on that technical and substantial merit I disagree.
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.
tons of companies use php, my company uses it even for modern development.
get out of your own bubble dude
Another survey : https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#web-framework... Puts the first PHP web framework not even in the top 10 of uses, behind framework in JS, Python, C#, Java.
How is this data even gathered ? And what is usage ? Do 1000 Wordpress count as 1000 servers ?
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!
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.
An yes, then there's Drupal, Laravel, Symfony, and many others, and they're going strong too. Heck, even Joomla is actively developed even though it's probably small enough today to be considered legacy.
Most newbie coders would start out coding their own blogs in PHP/Nodejs or Python on shared hosting, some web host use web framework as well.
Perl is still heavily used. I wrote more than 2K lines just last week, lots of it is throwaway. But hey not many languages make it easy for you to write thousands of lines of throwaway code in hours.
It's still the most useful language in the backend/unix world. This comes from me, who actually writes lots of Python code. But I wouldn't use Python where I use Perl. It would just make me slow and it wouldn't get the job done just as well as Perl.
It's not used as frequently for web dev, or other places where Java is used. But it's very good at what it does. Glue language for the Unix world.
Besides merely being an old technology doesn't mean legacy. SQL is fairly old.
Agreed. For any one-off (or occasional) task that in any way involves juggling text (which in Unix CLI world is nearly all of it), perl is still the fastest way to get done.
Back in '92 (roughly when I started using perl), its regex support was revolutionary. Today, all languages have decent string handling and regex support. And yet, none is quite so naturally well integrated as in perl. So here 30 years later, if I need to pick apart and recombine text, give me perl.
But, I'm pretty sure there's plenty of new projects being started nowadays in PHP, Ruby, Java, etc, because they're the most effective tool for the job.
It's just that this is not news. News is yet-another-standard-tool-written-in-rust.
Ex. I had to implement a task that would need to check if an image is similar to other image (not related to porn/csam). I implemented it with just a few line of PHP and no 100+ package dependencies. How? I run a linux CLI app from inside PHP, super easy.
but, but , you can do it with node too, - yes, but guess int he past in a node project, soem dev instead of calling ffmpeg directly he npm installed some shit package that called ffmpeg. The package was basic and it did not include or options needed , some other dev would have installed other package to get a new ffmpeg feature, /
I removed all those packages and done it directly.
My point is that we need to use the best tool for the job, if there is a CLI app or Java program/library that solves your problem a developer should present teh client the truth "I can solve your problem using this in 1 day or I can rewrite it in CoolLang and CollFramework and CoolPacakgeManager and CoolTranspilter with 100+ shit dependencies in 1 month. I am afraid many developers are choosing the last option to pad their CV and pump their ego.
I would say is also the ecosystem, PHP has a bit ecosystem and it can always use all the Linux applications (once in a project I integrated PHP with node program puppeteer) so there is no limitation, I miss more features in JS then I miss them in PHP.
Also, in general passing untrusted input to shell commands is probably a bad idea. FFmpeg has had many CVEs over the years and taking an upload from a user and piping it to a CLI command is asking for trouble. There are considerations beyond just doing the easiest thing that could possibly work.
This is why you escape the shell command arguments, but if you blindly npm install a shitty wrapper you probably hit the issue with security issues. Sure review of the dependency would be great but I did not seen many devs doing it, if they would have reviewed the ffmpeg wrapper would have noticed the simplicity and implemented themselves and on top of that learned some new stuff.
>Or, maybe developers who choose other languages are also competent professionals
I did not say that all of node developers are beginners, I am saying that many developers are not using the right tool for the job but use the cool tool for the job and some developers just blindly npm install shit because this is the only thing they know.
And I can confess I was guilty of this, on a project I propose to use Qt4 over Adobe Air because I was fan Qt and hated Adobe , turned out in the end I was forced to use Adobe Air and I loved it, for what we were doing it was the best tool for the job.
People from other languages don’t seem to want to believe it.
It doesn't help that despite the impressiveness of the 15 minute blog demo, Rails has always been somewhat difficult to get up and running, particularly on Windows, and it seems like that has only grown worse over time.
I am curious about that Scala number though. 2% of 10 million is quite a lot: 200,000 Scala websites? I would have never guessed!
I don't think a lot of new companies are based on Ruby anymore seeing on how there's hardly any talk of Ruby anymore. But that's just an observation.
Of course, that's in relative terms. It's nowhere near the size of the Java, JS or even Python market size, but demand is strongest than ever and salaries show that, too
I am actually finiding it difficult to get good paying jobs in Ruby and thinking of moving to Typescript.
1. Yes there are lots of Rails jobs but they wanted senior or at least mid level people who learned the deep nitty gritty of Rails at other companies. Few companies were willing to hire you as entry level to work on the job. The few entry level jobs had an ocean of candidates from the bootcamps.
2. I hated looking at Ruby code. Coming from a Java/C# background in college, it just make no sense to me and was ugly. I learned that while there are a billion guides on how to build basic Rails apps, there is very little on doing more complex things. A lot of that knowledge is just spending the time in a job learning a lot of things you can't learn in a book.
Now that I have internalized MVC architecture much better now I have considered going back to Rails to learn what I couldn't comprehend back then but every time I think about it I think about all the horrible nights I was sitting in my basement depressed that I was forcing myself to learn this crap and getting nowhere.
3. I should have dropped it much sooner. Instead I dragged myself in misery day in and day out and entered a deep depression trying to get some position....anything in Ruby/Rails.
4. I even resorted to unsavory tactics such as super fuzzing my resume just to get my foot in the door and ultimately bomb final interviews when asked about the inner working of libraries such as ActiveSupport among others. (Like seriously? Did I have to read all the C source of Ruby to get some basic job?). This fuzzed resume got me in a position where I was getting a 90%+ callback rate and the majority of them led to the final technical interview where I would end up not knowing some Rubyism or having difficulty solving a Ruby question in their existing codebase. Many rejections were due to the fact that while I solved the problem, I didn't solve it in the "Ruby" way. I guess Java/C#/C ruined my brain. I am not worthy of Matz's greatness.
Eventually through sheer dumb luck I managed to get a Angular2+/Flask position at a super large oldschool company only due to my nice manager knowing nothing about the tech stack so he took a chance on me. I thank god for this opportunity as I was maxing out my credit cards trying to survive. This low stress position allowed me to fall in love with Angular and Python and I have never looked back on the horror that is Ruby/Rails.
Thinking about my experience now(and this is subjecting to my experience interviewing at dozens of NYC companies), I noticed Rails being used at all these silly hipster startups that mostly produce garbage anyway. I remember interviewing for this "art studio" that was producing a revolutionary camera system in partnership with an Italian company. The company was just one giant room with round tables where Rails people would be making the web backend that connected with their camera system. They produced the product and got rid of their Rails people a year later. That seems to be the nature of the ecosystem. I saw so much of that in the Rails community.
6. This experience taught me that the community of the language will evidently affect your day to day life and overall career prospects. The niche nature of Rails allowed people who got in super early to make massive mounts of money (hence all the Senior Rails job ads promoting 200K in NYC) but you are mostly stuck working for these "cutting edge" hipster companies and if you don't or want to fit that scene then you are SOL. Likewise Angular and Python attracted some startups as well as enterprise companies due to Microsoft's backing and its excellent library ecosystem...
That being said, I know a fair number of PHP developers. None of them are in SV or Seattle. They are in cities many have not heard of. They're all over. Some do public sites. Some do company internal web apps.
Take a project like Symfony, a PHP framework. It's popular but not the most popular. Now, take a look at the download stats for its packages [2]. They are large.
There is software development happening all over the world. A bunch of it is in PHP.
[1] https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-wordpress
[2] https://packagist.org/?query=symfony
I think this is probably the biggest part of the HN bubble: the idea that "tech hubs" like Silicon Valley make up all, or a supermajority, of tech workers.
I've never even visited the west coast, never lived in a town larger than about 20k people, and frankly never really want to live in a city. Yet I work in tech, and have my entire adult life. (At this point, I am, in fact, primarily a PHP programmer.)
And I'm hardly an exception.
Nearly every company over a handful of employees needs tech support, programming, a website, even servers managed. Many of these will hire internally. Others will turn to contractors—who are also locals.
Silicon Valley, with its high concentration of tech workers and ludicrous salaries, is very much the exception here, and a lot of HNers would do well to remember that, lest they end up looking as out of touch with the real world as Lucille Bluth asking about the price of a banana. [0]
[0] https://media1.giphy.com/media/yJu2jIQZgPubm/giphy.gif
Not really a big deal. I'm pretty cutting edge, on the frontend (native apps for Apple systems, in Swift), but a bit stodgier on the backend (I use PHP). I’m not surprised at all by the survey results.
PHP works great for me. If I need something different (not an issue, so far), I'll hire it in. I'm actually fairly good at big projects in PHP. My code is maintainable and high-quality. It may not be “leet” PHP, but it works well.
Here’s an article about this kind of thing, that is a bit “meta”: https://veekaybee.github.io/2019/05/10/java8/
PHP is great fit for that, because all dependencies are part of the system updates in that case.
For at least the last decade I've been pondering re-implementing it in some fancy new language - but as it just keeps working, it slides down the priority list.
With all due respect, that is one hell of a bubble :). Plenty of companies use PHP (not just WordPress) and there are plenty of PHP devs who work with core, symfony, Laravel etc.
PHP is battle tested and even though it has its quirks, you can never go wrong with it if you are looking to build a web application.
P.S: We are hiring web developers for our company and PHP experience is preferred considering our stack.
I think your experience is probably limited then. Or you're not looking for them. ??
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).
And the corporate world move slowly.
And dev cost money. Most websites don't need more, they were fine 10 years ago and still are.
Although I'm not sure we have the whole story. I'm assuming we get high stats because of wordpress, which is not a good indicator of language popularity, but rather of platform popularity.
Modern languages have also time and time again forsaken the ideal of making development LESS COMPLICATED than prior languages, and this is why they don't take over markets. Creating more abstract languages just to do the same things that PHP, Python, Java, JS, and other "legacy" langs have accomplished (over many years) does not make sense. Too many people get credit for reinventing the wheel these days and it's a distraction from truly game-changing innovation.
Relevant and reliable function resides in a separate lane than innovative new solutions. They shouldn't be hyped and rushed to market as "PHP killers" simply because they generate buzz and new contract money.
And FTR... If you still have to compile code in 2021 prior to running it, you're burning a lot of extra valuable time off your life and away from your family in frustration just to find out that the advice on Stack Overflow was not relevant to your framework's new update, and you'll regret the lost years on your death bed... probably... Sorry, That had to be said... :P
...showing my age with this comment
LOL... j/k. :P
Architecture design and Agile now compensate for the traditional compile/test procedures... DEV > STAGE > PROD
When it's practiced with discipline it works well, catching most issues prior to the system going down anyway on deployments to PROD :)
Of course I do. No other environment is identical to prod, real data, real users, real scale.
I almost never run my code. If it compiles I know it's correct.
I write native Apple software (Swift/UI/App/WatchKit), and my server stuff is PHP (and works great).
I like to spend as little time as possible on the backend. I totally admit its not my strong suit, so having a robust, highly-supported, standardized, performative, language like PHP, with a gazillion assistive resources and examples around, is nice. I've been writing stuff in PHP for over 20 years, so I sort of know my way around it.
I'll be expanding my Apple native stuff into the new "pseudo-reactive" realm of SwiftUI, but I don't really plan to keep growing my backend chops. PHP is doing fine for me. If I need anything else, I'll hire the talent.
Take a look at the YC job board. A surprising number of the companies use RoR.
I have a comment from yesterday that is (rightly) sitting at -4 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28501661) that seems relevant: The rise of Ruby on that chart can be directly correlated with the rise of Shopify.
Elsewhere they note that Shopify "accounts" for 3.9% of the top million websites. The bulk of Ruby's increase.
Though I'm suspicious of the accuracy of their numbers. Most modern tech stacks don't announce themselves in the way that PHP did, and they clearly used curated metadata to attribute some major content engines (e.g. Shopify = Ruby, Wordpress = PHP, Wikis = PHP, etc), which means that anything outside of the top identifiable content engines isn't going to have proper attribution.
Further, note that literally any use gets credited. Look at the "popular sites using Shopify" at -
https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-shopify
Overwhelmingly they get the shopify/ruby credit for linking to a minimal checkout experience on a subdomain. That seems...incredibly dubious.
Still neat though. But what it really demonstrates is that product wins, not technology. Wordpress is clearly a winning product. Shopify is a winning product.
I'm convinced if you are a typical medium-sized business trying to recreate that technology with Node, Express, React, and a billion NPM packages, your are doing things the unnecessarily hard way.
No regrets because the last few years, never has an ecosystem been so bright.
The worst aspect of it is how unaware HN is of its biases.
I seem to recall a perl CMS - was is movable type? - that required mod_perl. This certainly gave it a perf boost against other CMS, but the overhead in setting up and maintaining a mod_perl system, and dealing with making code updates, was huge compared to PHP. I think these qualities continually get overlooked, decades on.
When interviewing developers, I always ask about their experience in handling sites large enough to comprise a farm, not just a single server. In all my years of searching, I've only ever come across one developer with such experience.
But here on HN, it makes it look like the multiple load balanced web and app servers we've got across multiple tiers, not to mention Docker and k8s, are on the small side.
There's definitely a big difference between those conversing here and "the unwashed masses".
To make a slightly problematic, somewhat poor taste analogy: 50% of the worlds houses (not a real stat, I’m lazy) have sheet metal roofs. All of the following are likely true:
- sheet metal roofs are wayyyy better than nothing for keeping the rain out. If you can’t afford anything else, definitely use them.
- Most people with sheet metal roofs would probably prefer something else, and would choose something else if the option was on the table.
- The prevalence of sheet metal roofs as a roofing material says less about sheet metal’s awesomeness as a roof than it does about factors that have little to do with sheet metal roofs (like global inequality).
- If you talk to construction workers in developed countries, they’d grant you that sheet metal roofing is quite prevalent worldwide, but they’re more interested in other materials and techniques that provide real substantial benefits.
I'm also quite happy to see Ruby continuing to grow in this report.
PHP has a huge market share in web sites, but much less in web apps.
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.
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.
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.
It's legacy is a hell I agree but quite irrelevant and getting old.
You know the saying “There are two types of programming languages, the ones you love and the ones you use”. That sort of thing. AND it still doesn’t invalidate my points:
1) PHP is relevant because of the software already written in it and that will not just get rewritten because PHP isn’t HOT anymore.
2) If you are a new PHP developer you are most likely going to be shoved into a job that has more to do with configuring, maintaining and customizing those preexisting systems.
3) Because of that getting from being a beginner PHP dev to an expert PHP dev is going to be harder than it should be.
4) There are going to be less PHP jobs in proportion to its usage out there because so many of the PHP jobs fall into the configuring, maintaining and customizing schema in comparison to other languages.
The changes and improvements are dramatic and wonderful. Improvements in speed, security, error processing, functionality/integration with databases, Composer, etc...
While I am not suggesting you go back to PHP, but things are simply not the same anymore.
2) Part of my point was PHP, regardless of what you may think of it, is not bad enough that any of that code needs a rewrite. Still PHP people concentrate on me not liking PHP and argue with me about that and nothing else. Why is the reflex in the PHP community to do this so strong?
But you can use modern PHP in your own theme or plugin if you want.
As for the reflex... PHP has had this bad reputation for so long, that most PHP programmers (IMHO, just an opinion!) feel looked down-on for using what is actually a pretty decent system now. Viewed as inferior programmers for preferring it.
I think you should realize that when someone expresses an experience people often times read it as warning.
And your experience sharing (as a warning to others) is not useful to the current state. And therefore could be considered damaging to other people's perspective without a counter "experience" being shared.
I have my experience and the fact that it aligns perfectly with yours up until you stopped using PHP should be appreciated for what it is.
I suspect one would see the former drop off a cliff, whilst the latter will always be quite high -- due to first-mover effects.
...due to WordPress, I'm guessing.
The next version is even going to improve on its weakest point, concurrency, with Fibers: https://php.watch/versions/8.1/fibers
Sure we all remember the bad old times and the horrible legacy projects that are still around but let's no forget PHP allowed the average Joe to hack up his own dynamic websites without jumping any hurdles. It helped democratize the internet for a while.
I really don't get why PHP is not more liked in hacker circles. Probably needs some new languages with slightly different syntax that transpiles to it for it to be hip again.
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.
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/
I think that was even the main point! If I'm not mistaken, OpenFL[1] is an effort by the same people.
[1]: https://www.openfl.org/
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.
To me PHP is an ugly language, with heaps of quirks and weird api's. The way it mixes markup and logic is gross.
That being said, I do like some parts of it. The way you compose pages by just writing "include" is nice. The way the server spins up processes for every request like a micro-service is nice.
PHP does have an elegant simplicity that many languages and frameworks lack these days...
Wordpress does mix the two, but Wordpress is definitely not a good example for modern PHP development!
We don't do that any more. You separate logic and view like in any other language.
In fact some people don't even use PHP for templating anymore but a domain specific language. (Though sometimes having a fully features programming language for templating can be nice so jury is still out.)
Honestly I am more grossed out with the stuff that some modern frontend frameworks are doing these days, where there is not separation of styling, markup and logic anymore with that thing that is like html but not totally html. I see the advantages but not sure how this will turn out in the long run.
Kind of tangential, but I've found a similar thing in the React framework: After all these years working towards splitting UI with logic, React asks me to hardcode the graphical components in a return (<module1></module1><module2></module2>) function. It is something I just cannot grok. I prefer frameworks that let you separate the UI elements from the logic that drives them.
The security track record of the language speaks for itself: https://www.cvedetails.com/product/128/PHP-PHP.html
It's been battle tested and lost many battles.
250 Ruby ads
420 PHP ads
1600 Java ads
1600 python ads
1300 .NET ads
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.
Or claim to.
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...)
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.