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Comment by ChrisMarshallNY | Hacker News Reader

I've been writing PHP for a quarter century, but I've never become a "whiz" at it.

But I regularly write fast, robust, secure backends, in a day or less (less, if possible. I don't actually like working in PHP).

Despite the torrents of hate from this community, it is still pretty much the backend king.

Here's the "Fishtank Graph."[0] It kind of puts things in perspective.

[0] https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/programmin...

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I agree that it still owns a massive chunk of the backend market. 20-something years in, and it's still difficult to shake.

However, I would take the numbers on the site you linked with a big grain of salt. Detecting which backend technology powers a site without direct evidence is nearly impossible. PHP may be high up the list since it and its associated stack leak the most metadata.

I've totally copied php http headers into non-php backends just to see what happens. It costs nothing and gets a trifle more security.

(Not really but it makes me giggle at least)

I've always found those statistics to be a bit odd, given how popular other languages are, especially the likes of Python.

Not only that, but since .NET Core and the new versions of .NET running just fine on Linux distros, I'd expect their usage to go up, not down.

Curious. Actually, their disclaimer page seems to suggest that setups with a decoupled SPA/API might not be detected correctly: https://w3techs.com/disclaimer

> the likes of Python

I've spent 15 years writing serious code and never ran into Python all that much until I went back to engineering school. I don't think a lot of people use it for their backend code, at least in my experience. But wow are there lots of stats and science people using it exclusively--it's completely ubiquitous in academia and research (though R is making headway).

I'm pretty sure that Python is the language of choice for AI stuff. I think even Apple's ML stuff is based on Python.

yeah you're right, I guess I lump that into "academia and research" as opposed to "software engineering" where PHP... exists

> I've always found those statistics to be a bit odd, given how popular other languages are, especially the likes of Python.

Think about how many Wordpress installs there are, not to mention Wiki's and forums.

Second that, PHP is still default for hosting providers. I get basic hosting for free on OVH with domain that has PHP by default. So even if I am .net dev on my job I still have some personal stuff in PHP because it is default and I cannot change it for that managed hosting env.

At my previous job, we had micro services in Java that did most of the work. The frontend was a thin layer of PHP that focused on SSR, but PHP is the only detectable tech from the outside

Surprised to see Scala running almost as many website backends as JavaScript. In my mind, it faded in popularity long ago.

Perhaps the Scala ecosystem is where Haskell nerds all decided to settle into?

The survey methodology is biased toward old technologies, from the era where you sent HTTP headers that advertised the stack you were using. Modern stacks often hide that info. (It's also biased toward techs used in blogs, since when it detects a tech used on blog.example.com, that tech is counted for example.com)

Also it biases towards smaller organizations which don’t follow security guidelines saying that you should disable those banners. There’s a real breadth versus depth discrepancy here.

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