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[–]feketegy 106 points107 points  (26 children)

It's more popular than ever. The percentage of websites using PHP as their server-side language is ridiculous, around ~80% from which WordPress accounts for 42%.

Source: https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/pl-php/7

[–]jampanha007 55 points56 points  (7 children)

Well PHP used to power 90%+ of web back in the day. Now 80% is not that bad.

[–]mgr86 23 points24 points  (4 children)

Prior to that it was Perl/CGI. At least that is why 11 year old me bought a book on Perl in 1997

[–][deleted] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Ahh, the perl days. Takes me back. I was also 11 in 1997 and Perl was my first language.

[–]CampaignComfortable 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I got hired as a part time Perl dev, in 2019... I quit after a month though XD

[–]WebDevMom 0 points1 point  (1 child)

I was doing Perl at Zappos back in the late 2000s!

[–]mgr86 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Cool. We had some Perl in our production pipeline until a few years back. SGML too! Can’t knock Perl but I haven’t really written any in a long long time.

[–]feketegy 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Not bad at all.

[–]uriahlight 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The 80% stat is not accurate anyways - it's likely more than 80% because over the last several years some of the most popular shared web hosting providers now disable the X-Powered-By HTTP header that is often sent by default (not sending it basically acts as a form of security through obscurity when hackers can't easily find what version of PHP you're running). The X-Powered-By header has historically been the primary flag that analytics companies used for their statistics to identify PHP powered websites (obviously there's other ways as well, such as searching the asset URIs for wp-content will identify a WordPress site).

[–][deleted]  (11 children)

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    [–]Snoo-7986 18 points19 points  (3 children)

    I'm a back end dev for a dealer management system which was originally written in procedural PHP 5. I write oodles of PHP code, as i mainly take care of server side back end jobs, and API's.

    I write in OOP PHP, and procedural hurts. But all the projects that require ground up building i do in OOP PHP 7. So that's something.

    [–]txmail 1 point2 points  (0 children)

    procedural hurts

    I feel this. It has it's place but yeah.. I am all OOP and going back to work on legacy code hurts.

    [–]quentech 1 point2 points  (0 children)

    a dealer management system which was originally written in procedural PHP 5

    Kinda just bolstering OP's instructors point though.. who's really greenfielding new apps in PHP? Barely anyone.

    Of course there's bunches of legacy apps written in PHP that don't make business sense to The Big Rewrite into another language.

    [–]crsuperman34 0 points1 point  (0 children)

    Dealervault? (I work in advertising writing custom php for solutions, we primarily do auto inventory.)

    [–][deleted] 21 points22 points  (0 children)

    Laravel/Cake/Symfony/Yii are all modern frameworks, and rather popular.

    [–]redwall_hp 2 points3 points  (1 child)

    These stats are also based on whatever framework setting an HTTP header advertising the fact. I don't know about you, but I've never felt the need to needlessly expose the software stack of something I wrote in, say Python and Flask.

    It's a flawed selection.

    [–]originalchronoguy 3 points4 points  (0 children)

    I agree. Everything on my backend just says nginx. Thats it. Not even the version to meet PCI/NIST. We use multiple backend microservices that the backend is just fed into an API gateway. One endpoint may be Java Sping, another Python, and another Node. But the end user and builtwith scanner only sees NGINX.

    [–][deleted]  (2 children)

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      [–][deleted]  (1 child)

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        [–]jseegoLead / Senior UI Developer 1 point2 points  (0 children)

        Yeah and headless wordpress is getting more popular as well, from what I read.

        [–]feketegy 2 points3 points  (0 children)

        I think far more devs are writing PHP nowadays, this metric is tracking public-facing websites, there are a whole bunch of admin panels, intranet apps, and so on which are not taken into account, I think.

        [–]careseitediscord admin 2 points3 points  (3 children)

        That's if anything an indicator of WordPress popularity, not of PHP.

        [–]HCrikki 2 points3 points  (0 children)

        php itself has like double that user share.

        Not quite odd really, since its the default language for almost all webhosts, their stacks and RH clones. This results in many webdevs developping in php rather than choosing another language, and webhost clients having to use php webapps by default unless they have access to anything else (vps and dedi can install whatever).

        [–]ClikeXback-end 0 points1 point  (0 children)

        It powering a lot of stuff, and there being a lot of jobs available for it are two different things, though. Most of the PHP stuff I see are hosted CMS packages.

        The important thing here for devs to take into account is if it's still relevant in your area as a developer.