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Huge progress in PHP since 2012.

Still gets dunked on, still powers a big chunk of the web.

Have they got rid of $ sigils everywhere? Are they planning to?

No and no and nobody (using php) probably cares.

Yeah that's ugly, but it doesn't really matter. What is worse is inconsistencies when declaring class vars and constants... But you learn to live with it.

Luckily PHP pop has declined drastically since 2010. Its barely holding on as a top10 language. We can all hope it dies some day. We need better and faster software, realtime and unicode aware. We dont need more php.

Even if popularity % is decreasing, in real numbers, number of sites/projects that use PHP is enormous. It will outlive us all for sure.

Real numbers is hard to measure with PHP. This is because of the weird world of CMS systems (like wordpress). From all PHP code out there WordPress is most likely taking 80% of all the online deployments. So is it really PHP anymore? Its just a UI you click, drag and drop and customize. You dont even have to touch any code.

IF this is the measure, why not count PHP as C, as its written in C?

I stil argue that a single javascript library (jQuery) is MORE popular in 2025 than all PHP installations combined. Take that for scale. Now add all javascript (non compiled) and it trumps PHP by a factor of 100.

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