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Programming Community Index for July 2013: PHP is regaining ground

• arxpoetica 13y ago
  Node.js is notably absent.
  • throwaway420 13y ago
    JavaScript is listed there, though I don't understand it's relatively low ranking given that virtually every website uses it.
    • petepete 13y ago
      A puzzling list in general; there are surely more Ruby and JavaScript developers than there are Perl and Visual Basic. Github's trends offer a different viewpoint: https://github.com/languages/ https://github.com/languages/
      • degroat 13y ago
        Github's numbers are going to be biased towards programmers who use languages that are more progressive. .NET developers aren't using Github and neither are many older companies that are still using self-hosted SVN and CVS repos.
        • earlz 13y ago
          ".NET developers aren't using Github" says who? I find about 80% of open source projects for .Net on Github. With the other 20% being split between codeplex, sourceforge, Google Code, and self-hosting/publishing
          • deleted 13y ago
            [deleted]
          • pjmlp 13y ago
            Open source is the keyword. Most corporations would faint just with the idea of hosting their code outside premises.
        • addflip 13y ago
          Yep. My company is using a throw back gem(Visual Source Safe) to host our VB6 apps written in '98.
      • jamesbritt 13y ago
        A puzzling list in general; It's TIOBE. This is to be expected. http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/tpci_definition.htm http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/tpci_d... http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3364265&cid=42508489 http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3364265&cid=4...
      • pjmlp 13y ago
        Github only lists a very tiny portion of all software that gets developed in the world. Actually I would say HN and Github communities tend to certain extent to overlap.
    • MostAwesomeDude 13y ago
      Let's define "virtually." There are plenty of websites that don't use JS.
      • bwilliams 13y ago
        Just about every website uses JS in some way. Even Google analytics (or other analytics scripts) being on the page means they're technically using JS.
        • papsosouid 13y ago
          But doesn't mean they have JS developers.
    • nbouscal 13y ago
      Having Google Analytics on a website does not make the people working on that website JavaScript developers. For many projects, JavaScript is tacked on, usually via a designer doing some tricks in jQuery.
• venomsnake 13y ago
  It just won't go away and always comes back - just like herpes but not as pleasant. disclaimer - PHP developer with 3 years of experience.
  • Shish2k 13y ago
    I'd consider even mentioning them in the same sentence to be an insult to herpes (PHP developer with 9 years experience. Now thankfully using Python for new projects, but still supporting PHP legacy D: )
• nutmeg 13y ago
  Please link to the actual TIOBE article: http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....
• joebeetee 13y ago
  C'mon Actionscript!
• dkhenry 13y ago
  When will we stop pretending TIOBE is even remotely relevant. Do we still honestly think that there are four times as many python developers then Javascript developers or twice as many Perl developers as Ruby developers ? This is absolute rubbish
  • deweller 13y ago
    Just because Hacker News is biased toward Javascript and Ruby doesn't mean the rest of the world is.
    • shubhamjain 13y ago
      Just forget the bias, how many alternatives are their to PHP in terms of back-end? Many : Python (Django), Ruby ( Rails ) and I think almost every major langauge has some port for Web development. Now what are the alternatives to Javascript: None. Why do you think PHP would be more popular?
      • nbouscal 13y ago
        There are tons of alternatives to JS if you count languages that compile to JS. Probably just as many as there are alternatives to PHP. Also, the fact that there are alternatives to PHP does not mean that they are widely used. We're in an echo chamber here, but in the real world, PHP is still the de facto language of the back end web. The LAMP stack is still the dominant setup. It's unfortunate, but it's reality.
      • martin_ 13y ago
        Rails and Django are frameworks, why are you comparing them to a language? It's hardly apples to apples.
      • venomsnake 13y ago
        If you have socket, concurrency and string capabilities you can create web backend in anything.
  • mattmanser 13y ago
• n1ghtm4n 13y ago
  The RedMonk programming language rankings seem much more plausible to me. They're based on 1) questions on StackOverflow and 2) projects on GitHub. http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2013/02/28/language-rankings-1-13/ http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2013/02/28/language-rankings-1-13...
  • nbouscal 13y ago
    Those are great rankings for the parts of the software development community that use Stack Overflow and GitHub. Here's a hint: those parts of the community are not representative of the community as a whole. Not even close.
    • dkhenry 13y ago
      I would claim the opposite. People who live in a vaccume can't very well be said to be part of a community.
      • nbouscal 13y ago
        I actually felt a bit weird using the word community and considered changing it to something else. Really though, just because they aren't part of SO or GitHub doesn't mean they live in a vacuum. There are tons of other focal points for developers on the web, and that's not even considering local user groups and meetups, etc.
• lkrubner 13y ago
  I find it humbling to look at these lists and see what most people do. At work we have had the occasional debate about Scala versus Clojure. I was for Clojure and I mostly lost (I didn't convince anyone). Perhaps mistakenly, I thought we were arguing about one of the big issues facing the tech world right now. What is the correct way to move forward in our new, functional, multi-core world? Then I look TIOBE. Scala is in 33rd place with a 0.326% share. Clojure is not even listed -- it might as well not exist. Lists like this remind me how easy it is to think that the thing you are excited about also has other people excited. But that is not necessarily the case. I've been using PHP since early 2000, when PHP 4.0 was still in beta. For awhile I loved PHP. It was my main language for most of 10 years. But the world has changed. I find it amazing that anyone would still use PHP for a project, given the wealth of great alternatives that have sprung up. Let's go back in time. Here is what the world looked like in the spring of 2000: I want to build a dynamic website. What should I use? I wanted to use open source so that ruled out Microsoft and ASP. I could use Perl, but Perl took assembly -- every module I could want was in CPAN but you had to know them and understand them and it was a bit of a hassle to assemble them (there was nothing quite as easy as modern package managers). Java seemed like overkill. The people who loved Java were, at that time, very focused on the enterprise and they were loudly promoting the benefits of the Struts framework (which in the end turned out to be overkill for every single type of application that anyone could ever actually want to build). And Java needed to be compiled, and there were none of the tools then that make life so much easier now. And when debugging the stack traces were fearsome. Then there was PHP. It was simple and it was all in one. No assembly required -- a huge built in library. No need to compile, just edit a text file and then hit "reload" in your browser to see the change. When debugging, the error messages were crystal clear and always told you what line, in which file, needed to be fixed. PHP was an obvious choice then. But things changed. In 2004, Basecamp was launched, and the world noticed Ruby On Rails. (Bruce Eckel wrote a great essay at the time about how this effected the thinking of a certain portion of elite programmers: http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=141312 http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=141312 ) Starting around 2005 there was a revolution happening in the land of the Java Virtual Machine. Dozens of innovative new languages sprang up (among the ones I worked with and admire: Groovy, Scala, Clojure). The tools improved dramatically: for debugging and profiling, Java had long had the edge, and now you could use those same tools with dynamic languages that were fun to work with. Modern package managers arrived, which made it easy to assemble libraries, and greatly reduced the benefit of PHP's all-in-one approach. Many of the new languages offer a REPL to make it easy to play with the language and assemble the code in a live environment -- this is even more interactive than the fast edit/reload cycle that made PHP seem so special in 2000. Meanwhile, PHP was going the other direction, towards more complexity. There was clearly a desire on the part of the core PHP team to imitate aspects of Java. I now work at a company that has a large CMS built with Symfony -- this is a very large code base full of classes that have what I would think of as "classic" OOP features such as variables with limited visibility outside of the class. This is not a bad thing, but please note, PHP is now, in 2013, the only language that I work with that gives me no way to automatically create getters and setters for class variables. (Some of you will say Symfony has tools that will auto-generate these classes for me, which is true, and if you like having your code auto-generated from other sources, like YAML files, then of course this is a fine approach.) What drew me to PHP, in 2000, was its flexibility, ease of debugging, ease of assembly (all-in-one philosophy) and the fast edit/reload cycle. It's important to note that PHP is no longer the leader of the pack in any of these dimensions. All of the same considerations that drew me to PHP in 2000 now draw me to Clojure -- its a dynamic language that does not get in my way, debugging is easy thanks to many debugging tools, assembly of parts is easy thanks to Leiningen, which is an amazing build tool, and the fast edit/reload cycle is replaced by the even better REPL experience. What draws people to PHP now? I loved it once but I can not imagine choosing it now.
• druiid 13y ago
  PHP never really went away. It's still quietly powering many, many websites out there (and not just sites running a copy of Wordpress). There are active developers making loads of projects with it still. I think it gets a bad rap on HN because there are so many terrible PHP developers and it lends itself to allowing them to function. I work with numerous GOOD php developers and it's quite a different story then. I do find it funny that Matlab is somehow in the top-20. I mean, I've studied engineering and the curriculum used Matlab for teaching, but how many real engineering firms out there actually use Matlab??
  • smacktoward 13y ago
    Yeah. PHP is really, really easy to get started with. This turns out to be both a blessing and a curse.
  • nbouscal 13y ago
    It also gets a bad rap on HN because it is just not a very good language. There are much better alternatives, and those alternatives are now really easy to use and deploy. Yes, there are good PHP developers, and they can make it work. I like to think I'm one of them. That said, if you give me the choice, I will pick almost any other language over PHP, no questions asked. It's not just warts (though there are plenty of those), the language has deep fundamental flaws. Relevant: http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/ http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-de...
    • coldtea 13y ago
      >It also gets a bad rap on HN because it is just not a very good language. It's not the language, it's the ecosystem. All languages have imperfections. Javascript, which does not have a "bad rap" on HN is even worse.
      • nbouscal 13y ago
        Javascript has some really, really bad parts. It also has some very good parts. PHP has the former, but not really the latter. The most common argument made for it is that it's drop-in-and-go, so you don't have to worry about things like application servers or deployment strategies. I would argue that that's the worst thing about PHP. Languages (and frameworks, etc) are well characterized by what they make easy. PHP makes it really easy to do things really wrong.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• quchen 13y ago
  Here's an index that is based on GitHub/StackOverflow instead of random search strings. http://langpop.corger.nl/ http://langpop.corger.nl/ (Fun fact: according to Google, there are ten times as many "C developer" than "C programming". TIOBE is somewhere between FUD and trash, stop using it.)
• shire 13y ago
  There is a reason why php is climbing the list, because how anyone can learn this language and for a beginner because they will learn server-side scripting from the get go with MySQL and this is great for transitioning to other languages that do magical wonders like Ruby ( on Rails ) but it would be cumbersome to understand how this works without really understanding under the hood which PHP will show you and when you move on to an elegant language you will appreciate pythons beauty if you have done PHP.