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It feels large to you because you are in it. Other language communities feel small to you because you are not in them.

PHP is still above Go, Rust, Ruby, and Perl in at least the TIOBE index: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

Are those all small communities too?

> The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers world-wide, courses and third party vendors

https://i.stack.imgur.com/Jteqd.png

I'm sure theres also still tons of skilled engineers for Perl around. Or Fortran. Definetely Java. But the TIOBE index looks more like taking inventory of existing skill throughout the industry and less like it tracks disruptive trends.

PHP is far from my primary language, but in no universe is the language that powers so so much of the internet "small".

Website traffic to servers running the language is not necessarily correlated with the size of the community

whats your metric for a large community? internet traffic? github projects? number public repos? number of packages? by every metric i can think of php is has a large community, not as large as java or python but still large.

how twisted does your dislike of a language have to be for you to not even acknowledge that a lot of people use it

github stars and volume of left-pad clone repos

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