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Date: Sun, 15 Sep 2019 11:08:52 +0100
Message-ID: <CAAwbVueab8PPdmrXYwqspG8YiZG3+-Xjhpp6V3Po13YNTo79NA@mail.gmail.com>
To: Zeev Suraski <zeev@php.net>
Cc: Mike Schinkel <mikeschinkel@gmail.com>, PHP internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] PHP's declining(?) popularity
From: oludonsexy@gmail.com (Olumide Samson)

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I also don't agree with the index and all its statistics, yet I'm not
invalidating it as it is a much-viewed index globally.

Though, what caught my eyes was this quote which I thought would be obvious
and Mike would have based those fact replies on(Yet I'm also not
invalidating his facts list and IMHO those as well would make sense in
PHP).

According to the index :
 "Till the end of 2009 everything went fine, but soon after that PHP was
going downhill from 10% to 5% market share in 2 years=E2=80=99 time. In 201=
4 it
halved again to 2.5%.

So what happened to PHP?
From its start PHP was the Visual Basic for web design: easy to learn, easy
to deploy, but mainly used by web designers with a limited software
engineering background.

The downside of PHP=E2=80=99s simplicity was that it was relatively easy to=
 shoot
security holes in it.

 PHP has been struggling with this for a long time. In 2014 PHP=E2=80=99s b=
iggest
supporter Facebook launched Hack as an alternative for PHP because it was
not scalable.

And after that, JavaScript, TypeScript and Python became the linguas franca
for web development."


These lines caught my eye more than the rest of the quote :

"The downside of PHP=E2=80=99s simplicity was that it was relatively easy t=
o shoot
security holes in it. PHP has been struggling with this for a long time."

These other quotes seems good to watch as it mention one of the biggest
supporters creating an alternative because PHP wasn't scalable at its
current growth stage, maybe we might have been bothering too much about the
past while not remembering the present and future(Which is 100s of years to
come, if PHP is still a thing on the top 50) matters most than the
past(which is just some 15-20 years gone) :

" In 2014 PHP=E2=80=99s biggest supporter Facebook launched Hack as an alte=
rnative
for PHP because it was not scalable. And after that, JavaScript, TypeScript
and Python became the linguas franca for web development"

On Sun, Sep 15, 2019, 8:18 AM Zeev Suraski <zeev@php.net> wrote:

>
>
> On Sun, Sep 15, 2019 at 6:33 AM Mike Schinkel <mikeschinkel@gmail.com>
> 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 :-?
>>
>
> First of all, Olumide, this is in fact wrong, although the general topic
> (language popularity and the reasons to it) is definitely worthy of
> discussion.
>
> The reason it's wrong is that TIOBE is a meaningless 'index' with a
> methodology that's not only questionable - but is rather downright
> idiotic.  It's not just off or inaccurate - it's practically a random
> number generator.
> See for yourself:
> https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/programming-languages-definition/
>
> The RedMonk Language Rankings has a much more reasonable methodology, is =
a
> lot more stable, and there, PHP is repeatedly at the top 5 languages and
> not losing any steam in both absolute and comparative measures:
> https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2019/07/18/language-rankings-6-19/
>
>
>> 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.
>>
>
> Mike - even though specifically the TIOBE index isn't a cause for
> virtually anything, the rest of your analysis is still relevant - as the
> key takeaway you're basing it on - Python's growth - is also reflected in
> RedMonk rankings.
>
> Thomas - I also wholeheartedly agree with your suggestion.  That's why we
> worked on FFI - to open the door for PHP to enter new areas.  Even JIT is=
,
> for the most part, not really relevant to the common Web case and would b=
e
> a lot more impactful in other types of workloads.  And there may be other
> things we can do.  But you're right - if we don't find a way to position =
it
> for these use cases in people's minds - it won't move the needle.
>
> Zeev
>

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