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To: Mike Schinkel <mikeschinkel@gmail.com>,
 Olumide Samson <oludonsexy@gmail.com>
Cc: PHP internals <internals@lists.php.net>
References: <F1E4D4E4-57E1-4B27-B6D2-81E9BA6B096D@gmail.com>
Message-ID: <1fb054cd-b21d-f50a-6498-bb516db9a5ba@cubiclesoft.com>
Date: Sat, 14 Sep 2019 22:36:05 -0700
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] PHP's declining(?) popularity
From: thruska@cubiclesoft.com (Thomas Hruska)

On 9/14/2019 8:32 PM, Mike Schinkel wrote:
>> On Sep 14, 2019, at 5:18 PM, Olumide Samson <oludonsexy@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> https://jaxenter.com/php-tiobe-sept-2019-162096.html
>> I think this is one of those things we get from voting no...
>>
>> I might be wrong anyways :-?
> 
> If those specific rankings are legitimately a cause for concern then it would make sense to do some objective analysis to determine why the languages that are growing marketshare are growing.
> 
>  From the list it seems Python stands out as having the most growth as a percentage.
> 
> Googling for "why has python become so popular" I get these articles.
> 
> I have copied their top level points but also included the text for the one point they all seem to have in common, that Python is simple, easy to use and easy to learn for new users (emphasis mine in all cases):

<snip>

Want an easy, one-line improvement that costs the community nothing? 
Python is primarily a CLI tool.  (Yes, it has GUI and, more recently, 
web bindings, but the vast majority of Python code I run into is 
CLI-oriented.)

Why?  Because those people who use Python don't realize that PHP is also 
a CLI tool and an excellent one at that.  Here's the website description 
for PHP:

"PHP is a popular general-purpose scripting language that is especially 
suited to web development.

Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to 
the most popular websites in the world."


There's nothing in those two sentences that readily indicates anything 
other than "tool for website development."  So people are going to look 
elsewhere for a language that does CLI and therefore that's what they do.

I tried to get the following change (or something like it) added years 
ago and it was initially approved but was later ignored or forgotten:


"PHP is a popular general-purpose scripting language that is especially 
suited to web development and command-line scripting.

Fast, flexible and pragmatic, PHP powers everything from your blog to 
the most popular websites in the world."


That's just one minor little text change on the homepage to make people 
aware that PHP is more than just a web development scripting language 
tool.  I write all of my cron jobs in PHP.  I write web scrapers in PHP. 
  I write *servers* in PHP that run as system services as root (uh...). 
Pretty much everything I do is in PHP...but very little of it being 
actual web development.  Whenever I bring those things up to people, I 
get funny looks that say, "PHP does CLI?  Huh.  Never knew that."


-- 
Thomas Hruska
CubicleSoft President

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