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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 th

• smoldesu 5y ago
  It could very well be that PHP is easier to distribute, and gets used in lots of groupware/industry-standard software that's deployed thousands of times across thousands of organizations. I'd imagine that kind of market share piles up after a while.
  • api 5y ago
    This is exactly it. Lower friction wins. You can just upload PHP scripts and go, while almost everything else requires many more installation steps or even monstrosities like Kubernetes.
    • heurisko 5y ago
      Modern PHP application development doesn't really use the "deploy PHP scripts to a folder" model any more. The more likely scenario is that a framework with a front controller is used, which is invoked by php-fpm, proxied by nginx. It's easy enough to do, though.
      • lowercased 5y ago
        The bulk of what I do is still, essentially, 'deploy to a folder'. There's some build steps, and a symlink swap from old to new, but that's still what it's doing. And I can still go edit a single file in a folder some place if I need to test/debug something. That's rare, but there are times when production is the only place an issue shows up (or... the only place you can replicate it - usually you can figure out enough from that to replicate locally later).
• AzzieElbab 5y ago
  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
  • jonwinstanley 5y ago
    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.
    • gjsman-1000 5y ago
      Literally my story right now.
      • jonwinstanley 5y ago
        Haha yes! I did Symfony/Laravel contracting for years and all the companies I worked for started like this.
        • AzzieElbab 5y ago
          I worked on a bunch of projects where PHP was still used for landing/home page and absolutely nothing else
  • fogihujy 5y ago
    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.
• brightball 5y ago
  I tell people all the time about how good the Ruby job market is. Lots of opportunities and not a ton of people to fill them for some reason. People from other languages don’t seem to want to believe it.
  • blacktriangle 5y ago
    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.
  • jrumbut 5y ago
    What's interesting is that PHP and Ruby are not just popular, they're increasing. 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!
    • dmux 5y ago
      I wonder if it's due to the Play Framework which could be used in either Scala or Java.
  • dncornholio 5y ago
    It looks like US adopted Ruby but in EU it never really catched the attention. EU is is still full of PHP. 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.
    • jegea 5y ago
      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
• clone1018 5y ago
  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.
• blueblisters 5y ago
  what do you mean by "efficient"? Developer productivity or server performance?
  • jegea 5y ago
    In my case, I was referring to developer productivity. In my experience, this is, by far, the most important limiting factor in any software project
• hexa22 5y ago
  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.
  • dubcanada 5y ago
    You've never seen a PHP developer?
  • mfer 5y ago
    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. [1] https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-wordpress https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-wordpress [2] https://packagist.org/?query=symfony https://packagist.org/?query=symfony
    • danaris 5y ago
      > 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] [0] https://media1.giphy.com/media/yJu2jIQZgPubm/giphy.gif https://media1.giphy.com/media/yJu2jIQZgPubm/giphy.gif
• dubcanada 5y ago
  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).
  • daneel_w 5y ago
    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.
• BiteCode_dev 5y ago
  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.
• human 5y ago
  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.
• winternett 5y ago
  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
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • iso1631 5y ago
    When else would you have time for sword fighting if not for compiling?
    • hnrodey 5y ago
      https://xkcd.com/303/ https://xkcd.com/303/ ...showing my age with this comment
  • Grimm1 5y ago
    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.
• ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  I guess I don't fit in, here. 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.
  • jonwinstanley 5y ago
    Agreed, PHP works great for APIs and the server setup/config is extremely simple with both Apache and Nginx
• MattGaiser 5y ago
  > despite not being "cool" anymore. Take a look at the YC job board. A surprising number of the companies use RoR.
  • jegea 5y ago
    Indeed! That's one of the things I like to review in those "Who's hiring" posts. That's why I'm happy to continue being a Ruby developer!
• defaultname 5y ago
  "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 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 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.
• gjsman-1000 5y ago
  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.
• polote 5y ago
  HN is a place for people building sartups, I doubt that the share of PHP usage in people building Saas startup is much
• gjsman-1000 5y ago
  While everyone else was saying learn Node, PHP is dead, and all that stuff on here - I ran the other way and learned PHP. No regrets because the last few years, never has an ecosystem been so bright.
• cerved 5y ago
  starting a WordPress doesn't count as building and maintaining a website
• jakearmitage 5y ago
  PHP is the original serverless. LAMP. FTP. PUT index.php. Done.
• goodpoint 5y ago
  > I think this shows how much HN is a bubble in itself. The worst aspect of it is how unaware HN is of its biases.
• dnautics 5y ago
  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.
  • lowercased 5y ago
    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.
    • dnautics 5y ago
      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.
• CWuestefeld 5y ago
  How much HN is a bubble in itself. 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".
  • eitland 5y ago
    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.
• nixpulvis 5y ago
  While very interesting nevertheless, just because other people are deploying WordPress websites, doesn't necessarily mean you should too. I'm also quite happy to see Ruby continuing to grow in this report.
• Uehreka 5y ago
  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.
  • cudgy 5y ago
    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.
• turtlebits 5y ago
  For me, the ease in deployment/setup is pushing me back to CGI-ish setups for server-side apps.
• SergeAx 5y ago
  PHP started in ~1995, became a thing in what, 2003 with WordPress? Wait 8 years, some tech discussed today may hit the charts)
• TheCoelacanth 5y ago
  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.
• kodah 5y ago
  I'm surprised to see ColdFusion on this list.