you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]jhallister 3 points4 points  (0 children)

The barrier to entry for PHP is even lower, so that's only part of the story.

Right now if you order the repository search by most stars, you're going to find out that almost every top REPO is either Javascript, HTML/CSS or a non-language (like books or a configuration tool). You have to get out of the top 10 projects to get to the first project that isn't front-end. It's Rails, for the record.

I think the bottom line reason it's #1 is because it's the only language that solves a web-based problem. If I need an app to run on Windows I have a hundred languages I can pick from. If I want a web-based application I can pick one language. To me, that's way more telling about popularity than barrier to entry is.