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PHP was popular 20 years ago and seems to still have wide adoption.

• rufius 6y ago
  By at least some measures, it’s the most popularly deployed language as well. This is probably at least 50% due to counting WordPress. That said, I did pick up PHP and Laravel out of curiosity. It truly is nothing like the PHP I learned in 2001. e: a word I’ve also seen a lot of job postings in that field. Seems like Laravel has a substantial following in the way that Rails does.
• fatbird 6y ago
  The fact that PHP was, in the era of shared hosting accounts, the default scripting language was like a slingshot maneuver around the sun. It's hard to understate the incredible momentum that surge of casual users brought to it that no other language received, and has sustained it over the long, painful modernization that was needed to make it relevant today. More than PHP, we're still using platforms that were begun in that era: WordPress, Drupal, etc. There's still Zencarts out there. It's more remarkable that Python is still relevant, which is a testimony to the overall quality of its design and its usefulness in a large number of different areas. Had Python been only a web scripting language, it would have been eclipsed by PHP just like Perl.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • cutler 6y ago
    I don't know about quality of design. Python's popularity is largely due to how much it dumbs down and being a first mover in the scientific world. Python has no built-in regex support and its crippled lambdas are nothing more than the indulgence of its BDFL who has a bias against functional programming. Compare that with Matz's approach to language design.
    • acdha 6y ago
      > Python has no built-in regex support Are you basing this claim on something like not having a special literal syntax? Python has had regular expression support for ages and it works quite well: https://docs.python.org/3/library/re.html https://docs.python.org/3/library/re.html
      • cutler 6y ago
        Yes, I'm comparing it to languages which have regex operators (Perl, Ruby) and where you don't have to `import re`.
        • acdha 6y ago
          Okay, so that's a somewhat different claim and it really comes down to how much you care about an operator versus a extra couple of characters. Most programmers know how to touch-type and do not hammer out regexps so quickly that the difference between: $foo =~ s/foo/bar/ and foo = re.sub("foo", "bar", foo) is a significant factor in deciding which language to use, especially since there are legibility tradeoffs (i.e. escaping) and the Python approach for handling e.g. groups is cleaner for non-trivial code and avoids the chance of accidentally clobbering $1, $2, etc. — a bug pattern I've seen affect people more than once. Personally, if I were advocating Perl I'd probably go with angles like the extended capabilities or more complete Unicode support which Python users need to get from the regex module (https://pypi.org/project/regex/ https://pypi.org/project/regex/).
        • Daishiman 6y ago
          Having been raised into the profession at a time when both Perl and Python were strong, the amount of times I have had to reach for regexes as a frequent solution to a problem is so rare that I can hardly see how it's a problem. It's about as much of a problem as not having built-in linear algebra operators.
          • fatbird 6y ago
            I thought this as well but didn't want to get sidetracked on a specific. Perl was one of my first languages and regexes were one of the big tools I started using, while I was processing text files. Once parsing lines of ASCII stopped being my major task, regexes stopped being a frequent tool.
• hossbeast 6y ago
  Php is banned within many companies as too insecure of a platform to build anything on.