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Comment by Killswitch | Hacker News Reader

What baffles me is how this site users themselves seem to dislike PHP a lot, yet it's the most used language of these companies... So why the hate?

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A couple reasons come to mind:

- PHP might be the most practical choice for some of these companies. The founder or lead tech might be most proficient in PHP for real-world applications (even if he adores Python or Ruby).

- PHP might be the language that everyone on the team knows so they choose it to keep everyone equally involved in the production of the site.

- The people commenting on HN aren't necessarily people who start companies (truer now than it ever was).

Edit: Also, it might be the case that some of these servers purposely lie about what language is used on the backend to thwart script kiddies.

Ruby on Rails Token =~ Rails 3/whenever the csrf token was introduced? (2.3ish?)

Yeah, they're splitting hairs on the Ruby count (not sure why). But I'm assuming that at least the number of PHP installs is somewhat accurate which is still a good number of the sites. Once you add the two Ruby counts together it does win out over PHP (which is more in line with what people would expect from SV types).

At least 10 of those 31 PHP sites are likely for the CMS Frontend. (Wordpress and Drupal)

People that want to get stuff done don't waste their time hating on other people's tools.

Almost everyone on this site, including devoted PHP devs, recognizes the fact that PHP isn't exactly an elegant and well-designed language.

The pointless "hate" however only comes from a small group of people for reasons really only known to them. But if you look outside the world of programming languages to the kind of people that loudly proclaim to hate something, I think you'll get a pretty good idea of the kind of people we're talking about.

These are not the majority of users of HN. They just feel safe here, like hooligans feel safe in a stadium filled with supporters of the same team.

Probably one of the best replies I've read in a while man. Thank you.

I would guess that a lot of Python sites are not getting counted for some reason, maybe because Python doesn't broadcast its presence the way PHP does. I'm pretty sure Dropbox and MixPanel at least make heavy use of Python, but neither is listed as a Python user.

This list looks extremely noisy to me in general.

It's not the most used language, actually, though I don't think it's your fault for misreading the chart. Ruby on Rails and "Ruby on Rails Token" were split into two different categories, based on how they figured out the site was using Rails. If you combine those two categories, ruby has higher usage than php.

Not to defend the php hate, of course. Just to point out that it's not actually the most popular language, despite the misleading graph.

There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.

Bjarne Stroustrup

First of all, as mentioned below if the server advertises PHP support, it's considered that the page is made with PHP (so a standard Apache install that comes with mod_php will make it think you're using PHP).

And second, I put my company's (admittedly not YC, but hey) homepage there just to try and since we're using a hosted Wordpress for the landing page so that business people can change the copy easier, it thought we're using PHP when in reality the app doesn't have a single line in it.

Iirc, PHP still leads Python and Ruby in general, so the YC numbers merely reflect the greater programming language ecosystem.

Additionally, Facebook has made PHP scalable with the HipHop compiler and other open source tools, so that's no longer a major reason not to use it.

> * PHP usage is based on server side implementation so a server might support PHP it doesn't necessarily mean the site is written in PHP

Maybe its because the YC founders are not representative of HN's readers. If so, why that's the case could make for interesting discussion.

Yeah - I noticed the same thing with Python / Django being so poorly represented - seems like there's an disproportionate number of Python related posts and discussions on HN - but it could just be my internal bias as a Ruby guy :)

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