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If so, it should be possible for HN commemtators to chime in with notes that they do indeed use it somewhere in their stack. I’m guessing the usage in a web si

If so, it should be possible for HN commemtators to chime in with notes that they do indeed use it somewhere in their stack. I’m guessing the usage in a web site is primarily Wordpress, which is pretty widespread. I doubt 70%+ of devs actually touch PHP in any given year.

nikodunk 5y ago
Agreed - although w3techs says it's only the top 10 million websites - this must be skewed heavily by Wordpress? I know the developer community is somewhat an echo chamber, but I doubt that Node, Rails, Go, etc are this much of a niche for web servers?
kgeist 5y ago
I used to think so, too - that PHP is mostly Wordpress and it's dying, its evolution stopped at PHP 5 and it's just better to avoid it.... But, by the will of fate, I ended up writing enterprise software in PHP, visiting PHP conferences, etc. and it made me realize how wrong I was. PHP is widely used in enterprise for mission-critical projects, in many large corporations, in distributed systems, in backends, it's not only about user-facing blogs; I guess it's not advertized much because PHP is old and "boring" as a language, but it does its job. Modern PHP7+ deprecates many of the old quirks, focuses on modern OOP practices, encourages type hinting, it's now one of the fastest interpreters; if you use something like Symfony/Doctrine then PHP feels more-less like Java/Spring/Hibernate but with faster prototyping/iteration times because PHP doesn't require compilation and there's less ceremony.
- theamk 5y ago
  Maybe depends on the region? In my region (not SV), search on indeed.com gives me: php: 390 jobs, ruby: 870 jobs, python: 6140 jobs, java: 4140 jobs so it is certainly not the most popular language out there
jv22222 5y ago
PHP is a primary server side stack in lots of startups and unicorns. I've used it as a main server side stack in every startup I've worked in for the past 20 years. Others use it like Airbnb, Facebook, Slack, and many more. This is a good read: https://slack.engineering/taking-php-seriously/ https://slack.engineering/taking-php-seriously/ A lot of people don't like it because of how easy it is to get into. There was similar feeling about JavaScript back in the early 2000's. People felt that it was just script kiddies that copy/pasted JavaScript so it was not respectable (at that time). BTW Laravel, and the Laravel eco-system has also helped PHP become a fantastic option for any project no matter how big or small.

nikodunk 5y ago

Agreed - although w3techs says it's only the top 10 million websites - this must be skewed heavily by Wordpress? I know the developer community is somewhat an echo chamber, but I doubt that Node, Rails, Go, etc are this much of a niche for web servers?

kgeist 5y ago

I used to think so, too - that PHP is mostly Wordpress and it's dying, its evolution stopped at PHP 5 and it's just better to avoid it.... But, by the will of fate, I ended up writing enterprise software in PHP, visiting PHP conferences, etc. and it made me realize how wrong I was. PHP is widely used in enterprise for mission-critical projects, in many large corporations, in distributed systems, in backends, it's not only about user-facing blogs; I guess it's not advertized much because PHP is old and "boring" as a language, but it does its job. Modern PHP7+ deprecates many of the old quirks, focuses on modern OOP practices, encourages type hinting, it's now one of the fastest interpreters; if you use something like Symfony/Doctrine then PHP feels more-less like Java/Spring/Hibernate but with faster prototyping/iteration times because PHP doesn't require compilation and there's less ceremony.

theamk 5y ago
Maybe depends on the region? In my region (not SV), search on indeed.com gives me: php: 390 jobs, ruby: 870 jobs, python: 6140 jobs, java: 4140 jobs so it is certainly not the most popular language out there

jv22222 5y ago

PHP is a primary server side stack in lots of startups and unicorns. I've used it as a main server side stack in every startup I've worked in for the past 20 years. Others use it like Airbnb, Facebook, Slack, and many more. This is a good read: https://slack.engineering/taking-php-seriously/ https://slack.engineering/taking-php-seriously/ A lot of people don't like it because of how easy it is to get into. There was similar feeling about JavaScript back in the early 2000's. People felt that it was just script kiddies that copy/pasted JavaScript so it was not respectable (at that time). BTW Laravel, and the Laravel eco-system has also helped PHP become a fantastic option for any project no matter how big or small.