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Comment by BiteCode_dev | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if this is because the report includes wordpress web sites.

Wordpress is just a content management system built on top of php. It would be silly not to include everything that is built in php. Most php developers do not code in raw php (when avoidable). Most modern websites that are custom built tend to be a php framework.

I don't say otherwise, but there is a difference between using a platform and using a language directly.

Definitely, most web programmers don’t code directly in the language though. Core library devs will but most others use a framework of some kind that abstracts the developer away from the raw code. This helps speed things up in terms of developing, helps other programmers quickly begin to assist with pre existing projects and also provides standard prebuilt methods for handling authentication, sanitization

Why wouldn’t it?

I'm sure it does, but that then mostly changes the meaning of "most used...language" to mean most used by end users, versus most used by developers.

Which I suppose you could argue, since it's likely passing through apache/nginx, which is fronting wordpress. So maybe 'C' is the most used.

... and indeed PHP itself is written in C.

They say they use publicly available information about sites, plus scraping metadata from the sites, but do not reveal the blend between those sources.

If they're relying primarily on scraping (which I have to think they are, given the scale of the operation otherwise), they're really measuring "what proportion of sites make use of languages which we can easily fingerprint in their stacks".

What I think this is telling us is that WordPress is popular, that WordPress is written in PHP, and that PHP is profligate in its use of headers that announce its usage. That doesn't seem very interesting.

The article emphasizes "server-side", which to me translates into "the most deployed..."

Yes, I don't say it's wrong, I'm just curious.

The implication is that WordPress sites don't represent what people are using to build software these days. This may or may not be a valid point of view depending on what you really want to know.

Not the implication is that wordpress is mostly a no code platform, so it would be interesting to have numbers for languages when people need to produce custom code.

if frameworks in other languages were compelling to use in place of wordpress, we wouldn't even be having this discussion right now

Framework != CMS

Most wordpress freelancers don't code, they configure or install plugins. Somebody using rail, django or laravel is going to code.

I agree. It would be interesting to see the PHP sites broken down into wordpress and non-wordpress

Why? They're both PHP

I think the more interesting breakdown (which admittedly would be damn hard to get) would be WordPress sites with/without custom PHP running.

"Anyone" can make a website with WordPress, but how many WordPress websites have programmers writing code for the website?

Because using a cms doesn't mean people chose a dev stack but rather a platform. The conclusion is not the same. E.g: most wordpress freelancers do not code.

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