PHP is traditionally used solely for websites. Some of those have grown rather large, to the point that having engineers optimize the language is cheaper than buying more servers.
Python, on the other hand, is first and foremost a scripting language. When performance does matter, you often end up using a wrapper around a C library, like NumPy. This means there is relatively little money in optimizing the Python interpreter.
It would seem sensible that since Facebook poured a lot of resources in optimizing PHP, Google would have done the same for Python.
Also, Python is the first or second most popular language.
Well they sort of half assed tried years ago - they employed GvR at one point. Then they gave up and they continue to lean heavily on C++, Java and there is thing they developed in the interim: Go.
> Also, Python is the first or second most popular language
Hogwash. For all the open source and other development that occurs and is “indexed” on internet discussion forums there is countless boring ass shit behind the scenes in sweatshops around the world and corporate back rooms. PHP, Java, and C# are still probably more popular to start.
Much of which is also in Python.
I say this as someone that has made their career mostly on the “top 5” TIOBE languages - but that ranking is a bunch of crap for the overall commercial software world.
C? Give me a fucking break. Never in 20 years have I known there to be more C than Java jobs.
And now everyone and their dog including doctors and other non tech-savvy professionals are doing Intro to Python courses (and then never touching it again) so they too can feel like they know something about ML or stats. Lot of noise.
According to 2022 Stack Overflow developer survey, if we exclude HTML, SQL and Bash, top five languages (as in being used by most developers) are: Javascript, Python, Typescript, Java and C#.
Checking here, if we go by pushes on GitHub, JS, Python, Ruby, Java, PHP are the top for 2021.
This is of course biased to only stuff on GitHu band public (assuming, but doubt they're publishing private data on BigQuery).
No idea how much of that is pet projects vs production of course.
By what metrics? Redmond quarterly from June shows Python at #2, and PHP at #4.
https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2022/10/20/language-rankings-6-2...
> By what metrics?
Hmm, why don’t you answer your own question?
> Redmond quarterly from June shows Python at #2,
That clearly is one that puts it “first or second”, yes.
But still wanted to know by what metrics the GP was making their claim.
I've looked at various sources since the last 5 years and not much changed. I hoped some languages like Nim, Crystal or Zig would pick up a bit of steam, but no.
Go and Rust moved up a bit and now seem safer bets to invest some time into.
For Python, the C integration probably makes things harder.