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According to this stats: http://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/programming_language/ms/y http://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/programming

According to this stats: http://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/programming_language/ms/y http://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/programming... PHP has 80% market share and growing. There must be some other advantages over this badly picked function names. But if we talk about disadvantages, me personally do not like WordPress because of its slowness.

romanovcode 13y ago
>There must be some other advantages over this badly picked function names. Very easy to learn
- berkes 13y ago
  I'd always argue against this. Python is, by far, easier to learn. Python was, after all, designed as a language to teach programming. The issue is, that people often compare apples and oranges here: Good, SOLID, and well-architectured OOP PHP applications (YII, Zend) are far harder to learn then Django or Rails. It is unfair to compare the "hacking of a free WordPress theme" to "setting up and deploying a full MVC application in Rails". When you compare similar stacks, PHP is, nearly always, the harder-to-learn choice. A simple, hacked-together sequential script serving a webpage is, by far, easier in both Python and Ruby then in PHP. If only for the fact that both Python and Ruby come with decent, built-in webservers. PHP has gotten this in the latest release only, but before, a fair comparison would be: a PHP app requires you to erect a full LAP-stack, whereas a python-script could be serving pages on the most barebone machine with Python installed. Again, the very beginning of PHP might seem easier to learn, because in practice, a lot of the infra is there and a lot of groundwork is already done (LAMP-stacks come for almost free; Passenger or Fastcgi not so much, allthough they are there). And then, when going a bit further then "removing these two menu-items in a WP-theme", when moving into the area of proper designed, maintainable webstacks, PHP is a lot harder to learn. And when moving one step further, e.g. including stuff like asyncronous workers, long-running-threads, commandline-tools, and so forth, PHP is often even completely unable to cope, but in the very least, proves a really hard and cumbersome tool.
  - Sharlin 13y ago
    You're correct, but unfortunately that's not the point. PHP makes it very easy to learn to write ugly hacky code quickly, and in the beginning, that's all that matters - the person learning simply doesn't know any better.
  - Tloewald 13y ago
    When comparing stacks, (1) to serve a PHP page you upload it to the server and you're done, (2) a basic PHP page is a web page. Python just lost. (Not that I don't prefer python.) It's not PHP, it's mod_php that makes PHP so easy to use.
  - todorstoyanov 13y ago
    Yep, I think Rails is easier to learn compared with Zend, which is over-designed for me. I will choose CodeIgniter in the shared hosting world, but in the cloud age haha, you can host almost everything for free - Spring, Rails, Django. So this can change the things, except for "Brochure Web Sites" where WordPress is the king.
  - spmurrayzzz 13y ago
    > If only for the fact that both Python and Ruby come with decent, built-in webservers. With PHP 5.4+: `php -S 0.0.0.0:8000`, just as useful as SimpleHTTPServer. And I wasn't aware of Ruby coming with a web server. I know of WEBrick for Rails -- but is there a standard module that Ruby ships with that's similar to the above PHP and Python servers?
    - berkes 13y ago
      Webrick comes in the <a href="http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib-2.0.0/libdoc/webrick/rdoc/index.html">Std-lib</a> http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib-2.0.0/libdoc/webrick/rdoc/ind.... I explicitely mentioned that the latest release of PHP comes with the built-in -S server. But that before this, it was always either install *AMP of some variation, which is, frankly a lot harder. And even now, Whereas Rails requires a few commanline commands, a CMS like Drupal still needs quite some fiddling to get it ro run on your localhost. (Source: I have been professional Drupal trainer for years) But let me note that neither three of these servers are anything good for production. But, for small (internal) projects, `SimpleHTTPServer`, `Webrick` or even `php -S` might suffice, especially when behind a reverse proxy. Yet of all three, Webrick is especially slow, and php-s is especially memory-leaking and unstable.
TheZenPsycho 13y ago
If I had to take a guess, with PHP there's never been an opinionated nerd yelling at you that you're not smart enough to do it. Just web-hosts and instant gratification.
berkes 13y ago
I find it hard to use this survey as actual statistics. I could not find any details on how they measure, how many sites and servers are measured and so on. As far as I know, someone emailed his 400 friends on Facebook and placed the results in an excel-sheet. * Does it take volume into account? Github (Ruby, Java, Scala) alone serves more pages then your average 10K Wordpress-sites will. Yet Facebook (PHP) serves such a huge number that it might even dwarve all the "enterprice" C#, Java and Cobol sites of probably all governments in the entire EU. * Does it take economic value in account? One gov. site, or one large application (say, google docs) alone costs a multitude of what a 100K mom&pop PHP-webshops have cost. I, personally (as in: this is not a statistic nor any proof of anything) see a lot more value going around in the Ruby on Rails webdevelopment-economy then in the PHP-economy; the latter seems to consist of mostly a few-hundred-bucks Drupal installs or WordPress themes, whereas the first is almost always custom built and startup-development growing far over the 1K. * How do they adjust for "not recognised"? I mean: it is hard to hide the fact that you are running a Drupal site, even for something large as the Whitehouse.gov. Whereas your average custom-built Django-backend is probably not even accessible for crawlers and even if so, most probably not recognisable as being Python/Django powered. In other words: off-the-shelve stacks are far more often recognised; and are, quite probably, nearly always PHP. * How does this account for all the backend? Sure, WordPress is written in PHP, but many WP sites run off MySQL, which is just as important as the PHP-part; is WP not, PHP and MySQL powered then? Or other backends: the startup where I work now, has 90% of its code in the backend, Rails, with a tiny 200 lines PHP-app facing our users. This is certainly not a PHP-app, but would this survey count it as such?
- warfangle 13y ago
  > Facebook (PHP) Facebook (PHP transpiled to C and compiled into a binary)
  - berkes 13y ago
    which is why I mentioned this specifically: would this survey count Facebook as PHP, or as C? This makes a big difference on the outcome of "the amount of large sites running on language X"

romanovcode 13y ago

>There must be some other advantages over this badly picked function names. Very easy to learn

berkes 13y ago
I'd always argue against this. Python is, by far, easier to learn. Python was, after all, designed as a language to teach programming. The issue is, that people often compare apples and oranges here: Good, SOLID, and well-architectured OOP PHP applications (YII, Zend) are far harder to learn then Django or Rails. It is unfair to compare the "hacking of a free WordPress theme" to "setting up and deploying a full MVC application in Rails". When you compare similar stacks, PHP is, nearly always, the harder-to-learn choice. A simple, hacked-together sequential script serving a webpage is, by far, easier in both Python and Ruby then in PHP. If only for the fact that both Python and Ruby come with decent, built-in webservers. PHP has gotten this in the latest release only, but before, a fair comparison would be: a PHP app requires you to erect a full LAP-stack, whereas a python-script could be serving pages on the most barebone machine with Python installed. Again, the very beginning of PHP might seem easier to learn, because in practice, a lot of the infra is there and a lot of groundwork is already done (LAMP-stacks come for almost free; Passenger or Fastcgi not so much, allthough they are there). And then, when going a bit further then "removing these two menu-items in a WP-theme", when moving into the area of proper designed, maintainable webstacks, PHP is a lot harder to learn. And when moving one step further, e.g. including stuff like asyncronous workers, long-running-threads, commandline-tools, and so forth, PHP is often even completely unable to cope, but in the very least, proves a really hard and cumbersome tool.
- Sharlin 13y ago
  You're correct, but unfortunately that's not the point. PHP makes it very easy to learn to write ugly hacky code quickly, and in the beginning, that's all that matters - the person learning simply doesn't know any better.
- Tloewald 13y ago
  When comparing stacks, (1) to serve a PHP page you upload it to the server and you're done, (2) a basic PHP page is a web page. Python just lost. (Not that I don't prefer python.) It's not PHP, it's mod_php that makes PHP so easy to use.
- todorstoyanov 13y ago
  Yep, I think Rails is easier to learn compared with Zend, which is over-designed for me. I will choose CodeIgniter in the shared hosting world, but in the cloud age haha, you can host almost everything for free - Spring, Rails, Django. So this can change the things, except for "Brochure Web Sites" where WordPress is the king.
- spmurrayzzz 13y ago
  > If only for the fact that both Python and Ruby come with decent, built-in webservers. With PHP 5.4+: `php -S 0.0.0.0:8000`, just as useful as SimpleHTTPServer. And I wasn't aware of Ruby coming with a web server. I know of WEBrick for Rails -- but is there a standard module that Ruby ships with that's similar to the above PHP and Python servers?
  - berkes 13y ago
    Webrick comes in the <a href="http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib-2.0.0/libdoc/webrick/rdoc/index.html">Std-lib</a> http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib-2.0.0/libdoc/webrick/rdoc/ind.... I explicitely mentioned that the latest release of PHP comes with the built-in -S server. But that before this, it was always either install *AMP of some variation, which is, frankly a lot harder. And even now, Whereas Rails requires a few commanline commands, a CMS like Drupal still needs quite some fiddling to get it ro run on your localhost. (Source: I have been professional Drupal trainer for years) But let me note that neither three of these servers are anything good for production. But, for small (internal) projects, `SimpleHTTPServer`, `Webrick` or even `php -S` might suffice, especially when behind a reverse proxy. Yet of all three, Webrick is especially slow, and php-s is especially memory-leaking and unstable.

TheZenPsycho 13y ago

If I had to take a guess, with PHP there's never been an opinionated nerd yelling at you that you're not smart enough to do it. Just web-hosts and instant gratification.

berkes 13y ago

I find it hard to use this survey as actual statistics. I could not find any details on how they measure, how many sites and servers are measured and so on. As far as I know, someone emailed his 400 friends on Facebook and placed the results in an excel-sheet. * Does it take volume into account? Github (Ruby, Java, Scala) alone serves more pages then your average 10K Wordpress-sites will. Yet Facebook (PHP) serves such a huge number that it might even dwarve all the "enterprice" C#, Java and Cobol sites of probably all governments in the entire EU. * Does it take economic value in account? One gov. site, or one large application (say, google docs) alone costs a multitude of what a 100K mom&pop PHP-webshops have cost. I, personally (as in: this is not a statistic nor any proof of anything) see a lot more value going around in the Ruby on Rails webdevelopment-economy then in the PHP-economy; the latter seems to consist of mostly a few-hundred-bucks Drupal installs or WordPress themes, whereas the first is almost always custom built and startup-development growing far over the 1K. * How do they adjust for "not recognised"? I mean: it is hard to hide the fact that you are running a Drupal site, even for something large as the Whitehouse.gov. Whereas your average custom-built Django-backend is probably not even accessible for crawlers and even if so, most probably not recognisable as being Python/Django powered. In other words: off-the-shelve stacks are far more often recognised; and are, quite probably, nearly always PHP. * How does this account for all the backend? Sure, WordPress is written in PHP, but many WP sites run off MySQL, which is just as important as the PHP-part; is WP not, PHP and MySQL powered then? Or other backends: the startup where I work now, has 90% of its code in the backend, Rails, with a tiny 200 lines PHP-app facing our users. This is certainly not a PHP-app, but would this survey count it as such?

warfangle 13y ago
> Facebook (PHP) Facebook (PHP transpiled to C and compiled into a binary)
- berkes 13y ago
  which is why I mentioned this specifically: would this survey count Facebook as PHP, or as C? This makes a big difference on the outcome of "the amount of large sites running on language X"