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Comment by ChrisMarshallNY | Hacker News Reader

I’ve used PHP for more than 20 years. It’s my “go-to” language for the backend. I’m not a server programmer, and PHP is fast, well-supported, and, if you’re a decent programmer, you can write robust, secure, performant servers in it.

I also really don’t like the language. I’ve never warmed to it.

But I think it will still be around, as a principal backend language, for the next fifty years.

I feel like this graph says it all: https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/programmin...

I call it "The Fishtank Graph," for obvious reasons.

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I wonder where this graph gets it's data from. Scala sitting at 4.6 percent and python at 1.2 percent is not what I would expect, but my perception of the industry could be totally off.

Yeah this feels off, though if its assessing all/many sites it could make some sense, versus assessing the top N sites by traffic.

See my note about the pron industry.

Those sites get a lot of traffic.

I did notice that JavaScript (which may include TypeScript) is going up, but so is Java, and that Java is still higher than JavaScript.

> server-side programming languages for websites

Maybe because most websites are Wordpress websites.

The PHP thing is believable, I'm just still stuck on scala vs python based on my observations from working in the industry and being part of the hiring process for both of these languages. Perhaps it's because I work in B2B SAAS where these products aren't always necessarily exposed to the public internet.

I think that we tend to have personal biases, depending on the context of our relationships and professional cultures.

I totally believe the graph, if only for things like WordPress, and a number of other infrastructure-level tools.

I know that the porn industry is still big on PHP. There was a post here, some time ago, that linked to a PornHub programmer, talking about their IT stack, and it was all PHP.

It's a boring workhorse. The "boring" part is attractive to IT pros.

I wonder where this graph gets it's data from

They've apparently written their own web crawler that attempts to infer what language is used based on a bunch of, unspecified, heuristics. I wonder if at least some of the problem is that it is very easy to see if site uses PHP and much harder to see if a site uses a python backend and a such most python using sites just aren't being counted.

i feel like that graph just shows wordpress dominance (43% of all websites) and a bit of joomla (2%) and drupal (1%), which are all php based.

I've also used it for about 20 years now. Surprised you haven't warmed up to it. It's perfectly fine. I still use it for scripts from time to time even though I prefer TS now because it's got some good stuff built-in.

I don't hate it, but I've never really gotten excited about it, like I did for C++, or Swift.

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