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Comment by whenlambo | Hacker News Reader

Dying?

“PHP is the most used server-side programming language globally”

I think those can both be true. For instance, Google Trends[0] shows interest in it falling significantly with time. However, Wordpress is written in it, so a lot of people are still running PHP on their servers.

I wonder if PHP:Wordpress is becoming like Ruby:Rails, where there’s no reason you can’t use the language for other things, but in practice it’s mostly used for one specific purpose?

[0] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%...

It's not only Wordpress. There's also Drupal, Joomla and the myriad of plugins written for them, as well as forums software like Vanilla, phpbb and vBulletin. Actually, I predict a resurgence in forum software popularity as more people realize Reddit is for suckers; there is of course Discourse, but that's like New Reddit, looks cool until you use it and realize it's kinda shit.

Those are rounding errors compared to WordPress[0]. BTW, I'm neutral on WP. I've used it before and it was fine, but I don't work for Automattic or anything. I think it's the elephant in the PHP room, though. No one can claim that PHP is only used for WordPress, but I bet that the majority of PHP installations are there because that's what WP happens to be written in.

[0] https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_management

> Discourse looks cool until you use it and realize it's kinda shit

What do you recommend instead?

I’ve thought about returning to old times and spinning up a phpBB site.

Smf reminds me of old times. phpBB is still active.

Yeah, I just haven’t used one in over a decade. Most of the communities I used to use had one.

Try discourse with javascript disabled, much more usable.

They said "reputation", not that PHP was _actually_ dying

Mostly people who've never written a line of php in their life assuming the same about everyone else.

I started using PHP in 1999 and it was my main language until 2011. But PHP no longer has the advantages that made it outstanding back in 1999. Other languages caught up and moved ahead. When I need a dynamic language, I'd rather program in Clojure, and when I need strict types, I'd rather work with Java, which is much easier to get going nowadays than it was back in 1999.

PHP has Wordpress, in the same way Ruby has Rails. In both cases, the languages survive because they've got at least one great killer app. But both languages have stagnated relative to the developments that happened elsewhere. Circa 2000 it was as obvious as the sun is bright that PHP was the easiest way to program for the Web. Nowadays it is a royal pain.

The one place where PHP still has use for me is when I need to write a small server script: I'd rather use PHP than bash. But this is a very small use case.

I don't think it's exactly synonymous with market share.

The numbers are a bit distorted due to a few "killer apps" like Wordpress. I think if you looked at it in terms of number of developers using a language then it will have fallen quite precipitously.

Dying is an exaggeration anyway, I think PHP is just no longer in it's glory days of the 00s.

I'm personally hopeful that PHP might have a renaissance. The language developers have done a really good job of modernising it and removing the really nasty stuff over the last ~7 years, I think it's just the standard library that's left as a significant eyesore. Unfortunately Nikita's stepped down from PHP development recently and he was a real powerhouse so it remains to be seen if it can maintain its trajectory.

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