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Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

I strongly dislike how people look to github as an example, its the highest appeal to authority.

I know facebook uses mysql, but I also know that it is a bastardised custom version that has known constraints and has limited use (no foreign keys for example).

I spoke to the DBA who first deployed MySQL at Github and the vibe I got from him immediately was that he had doubled down on his prejudice: which is fine, but its not ok to ignore that it can be a lot of effort to work around issues with any given technology.

For a great example of what I mean: most people wouldn’t choose PHP for a new project (despite it having improved majorly) - the appeal to authority there is to say “it works for Facebook” without mentioning “Hack” or the myriad of internal processes to avoid the warts of PHP.

That a large headcount company can use something does not make it immune from criticism.

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> most people wouldn’t choose PHP for a new project

Is this really true?

I used to be a full-time PHP developer but I personally don't touch that language anymore. But it's still very popular around the world, I've seen multiple projects start this year use PHP, because that's the language the founders/most developers in the company are familiar with. Probably depends a lot on where in the world you're located.

Last Stack Overflow survey had ~20% of the people answering the survey saying that they still use PHP in some capacity.

The beauty of PHP is that it is stateless and the end of the run, everything is freed. It is difficult to have memory leaks.

Personally, I like using Typescript/Javascript on both front end and backend, but I don’t look down at PHP backends at all. And it’s come a long way as a language.

I’ve been a fan of rolling your own stdlib as the semantics there are old and weird, but vscode tells you so who cares anymore.

> most people wouldn’t choose PHP for a new project

Most people on HN, or most developers in the world?

PHP is still very popular, and plenty of people start new projects in it all the time.

> does not make it immune from criticism

Show me a technology without critics and I'll show you a technology zero people use.

I mean, outside of HN too: new projects are less and less commonly PHP based.

https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pull_requests/2023/3

I don't think that data is particularly meaningful, unless you're also going to claim that both JavaScript and Ruby are "less and less commonly" used, because they've both had much bigger drops, according to that data.

Pulls, Pushes, Issues and GitHub stars are terrible ways to gauge the popularity of a language.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

There is no better measure I'm aware of, and I'll take any measure you supply.

I would definitely also argue that Ruby is in pretty significant decline, the majority of Ruby projects were sysadminy projects from the 2010 era and most sysadminy types learned it as an alternative to perl. Web developers who learned it were mostly using Rails which has fallen somewhat out of favour. YMMV obviously, but I can understand it's decline as Python has concretely taken over the working space and devops tools like Chef/Puppet are not en-vogue any longer as Go and Kubernetes/CNCF stuff took the lions share.

Equally: javascript (node, really) is less favourable to many JS devs than Typescript. If you aggregate TS and JS then you'll see that the ecosystem is growing but many people who are JS folks have switched to TS.

I'm taken aback by what you seem to suggest though; Would you seriously claim that most new projects ARE using PHP?

I would happily argue that point with any data you supply, it's completely contrary to my experience and understanding of things and I have a pretty wide and disparate social circle in tech companies.

> I'm taken aback by what you seem to suggest though; Would you seriously claim that most new projects ARE using PHP?

No. I didn't say that, and we need to clarify what you meant originally to make sense here.

When you say "most people wouldn't start a project in php", there are two ways to interpret "most" in that sentence: "the majority of" (ie 50%+) or "nearly all of" (ie a much higher percentage). Both are accepted definitions for "most".

I assumed you meant the latter: ie "nearly everyone would not start a project in php", which is what I disagree with, because the former makes little sense in context.

If you did in fact mean "a majority of people would not start a project in php" then of course I agree because that sentence can be substituted to mention any programming language in existence and still be true, because none are ever so dominant over all others in terms of popularity, that more than half of all new projects are written in said language.

it's a little bit hair splitty, but I see what you might be trying to get at.

What I tried to convey is that PHP is not enjoying the development heyday it once had, and the numbers of people choosing PHP for a new project today (even among people who learned development with PHP) is decreasing. It's not popular.

let's try to leave it as: "I believe PHP to be in decline for new projects as a share of total new projects divided by the total number of developers who are starting new projects".

Ruby has had a huge decline in the past ten years, IMO.

Also, note that TypeScript is tracked separately from Javascript, which is likely part of its decline. I wouldn't be surprised if JS backends are ultimately declining as well (perhaps Go and Python are taking its place?)

> Ruby has had a huge decline in the past ten years, IMO.

People keep saying that. Ruby has had a "huge decline" if you look at the percentage of commits on Github over the last decade [1], a decrease of more than a factor of 3. However, in that same decade Github has grown (much) more than a factor of 3. So the total number of Ruby commits on GitHub has grown substantially. That's not really what I would call a huge decline.

[1] https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pull_requests/2023/3

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