It might not be the most popular language around the HN crowd, but this forum is subject to trends and "emerging technologies" - not necessarily to say that these technologies are better or worse, just that they are the flavor of the month.
It's hard to argue with the numbers, PHP is still the most popularly used language [1] and while the gap is being bridged, it is really minuscule in comparison. I'm sure that while you may hate PHP, not every single developer does.
Yes, yes, down vote me, I'm a proud PHP developer and to even utter such words on this site seems to result in the most powerful of criticisms, but subjective to this entire argument is that behind every person who writes PHP is a ruby coder, tutting and shaking his head, stood behind him is a Node.js developer, laughing at him, behind him is somebody writing Assembly, scowling in to the distance in disgust, behind him is a C coder, eyes wide with surprise that someone is working in Assembly, etc.
I give it a few years until people are crying out loud on here that Node.js is dead and superlanguageemulator.pm or whatever comes next is the only way to code, at least, for people wise and intelligent enough to embrace this new technology.
That link isn't really credible at all. There are two obvious and major omissions that render their chart meaningless.
They don't say how they determine whether a technology is being used server side -- it could be only if they see ".php" URLs on the site, for example, which would mean there would be a strong bias against languages that make it easy to write sane URLs.
They also don't share what % of sites they're able to make a determination for at all, so these numbers could be based on a statistically insignificant sample.
You only have to go on the job market to see what languages are the most popular; PHP, JAVA and the various .Net (Mostly VB and C#).
JS is on the rise, but no one hires anyone to write just JS. It's usually JS and PHP (and of course, HTML, CSS).
And another point, outside the bubble (I mean a place like Florida) it's hella easier finding a decent PHP guy than Python (or Ruby) guy. I learned that the hard way.
From what I can see, in my area (north England) the job market is almost entirely dominated by PHP and .net openings, with some Java on the side. Ruby and Python only very rarely get a look in, I imagine it would actually be difficult to find work in this area if you only knew Ruby or Python.
The job market in CA is very different to pretty much everywhere else in that emerging and niche technologies tend to be under-represented outside of CA, most likely because of budget constraints in web development, most clients want a simple Joomla or WordPress site and couldn't care less about anything else as long as they don't have to pay over £2,000 for it.
Re: the first para, definitely. I still get emails from recruiters (probably left something up on an old CV site I've since forgotten about), and every single one up north involves PHP and MySQL. The more imaginative roles include a bit of jQuery.
I got the idea from hiring. Look at what was being advertised for; what I was competing against.. But I live in Florida. What area of the country are you?
By default PHP includes an X-Powered-By header in the response containing the PHP version used (should be turned off in production but is often not). This is a more common thing to track.
> which would mean there would be a strong bias against languages that make it easy to write sane URLs
This is false. It is very easy to make sane URLs in PHP. You just designate index.php (or whatever you want, actually) as the default index in your http server. In fact, that's how it works in every language?
Clearly not, it was a satire of our industry. I was comparing the attitudes of people, the languages they use were merely for the purpose of the narrative, it could quite easily have been Node.js and Perl or Python and Haskell
It might not be the most popular language around the HN crowd, but this forum is subject to trends and "emerging technologies" - not necessarily to say that these technologies are better or worse, just that they are the flavor of the month.
It's hard to argue with the numbers, PHP is still the most popularly used language [1] and while the gap is being bridged, it is really minuscule in comparison. I'm sure that while you may hate PHP, not every single developer does.
Yes, yes, down vote me, I'm a proud PHP developer and to even utter such words on this site seems to result in the most powerful of criticisms, but subjective to this entire argument is that behind every person who writes PHP is a ruby coder, tutting and shaking his head, stood behind him is a Node.js developer, laughing at him, behind him is somebody writing Assembly, scowling in to the distance in disgust, behind him is a C coder, eyes wide with surprise that someone is working in Assembly, etc.
I give it a few years until people are crying out loud on here that Node.js is dead and superlanguageemulator.pm or whatever comes next is the only way to code, at least, for people wise and intelligent enough to embrace this new technology.
[1] http://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/programming_languag...