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Date: Mon, 16 Sep 2019 09:46:33 -0400
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To: Zeev Suraski <zeev@php.net>
Cc: Olumide Samson <oludonsexy@gmail.com>, Mike Schinkel <mikeschinkel@gmail.com>, 
	PHP internals <internals@lists.php.net>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] PHP's declining(?) popularity
From: chasepeeler@gmail.com (Chase Peeler)

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On Sun, Sep 15, 2019 at 8:14 AM Zeev Suraski <zeev@php.net> wrote:

> On Sun, Sep 15, 2019 at 1:15 PM Olumide Samson <oludonsexy@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > I also don't agree with the index and all its statistics
> >
>
> I'm not sure what you mean by 'all its statistics'.  Mostly everything on
> the methodology page is fluff, which may be purposely there to hide the
> only part that really matters:
> ----------------
>
> The ratings are calculated by counting hits of the most popular search
> engines. The search query that is used is
>
> +"<language> programming"
>
>  ---------------
>
> It's a simplistic measure of an arbitrary search term in search engines -
> nothing more.  It's completely, 100.0% meaningless.
>
>
> > , yet I'm not invalidating it as it is a much-viewed index globally.
> >
>
> I am.  It's quite remarkable that people are paying any level of attentio=
n
> to it whatsoever, and indeed it's saddening.  But the fact that many peop=
le
> believe something doesn't make it true, if the evidence clearly suggest i=
t
> isn't.
>
> According to the index :
> >  "Till the end of 2009 everything went fine, but soon after that PHP wa=
s
> > going downhill from 10% to 5% market share in 2 years=E2=80=99 time. In=
 2014 it
> > halved again to 2.5%.
> >
>
> Trying to correlate the TIOBE index with anything that happened in the PH=
P
> world is akin to trying to correlate the results of rand() with the weath=
er
> forecast.  The two aren't related at all.  Building any thesis on the
> foundation of the TIOBE index is like trying to build a brick house on a
> muddy soil.  Heck, like trying to build a brick house in the middle of th=
e
> ocean.  There's nothing to build on.
>
> While it's extremely difficult to measure the popularity of languages,
> RedMonk's slightly more relevant measurements (GitHub projects and Stack
> Overflow questions) suggest it's been doing well over the last decade -
> right up there in the top 5 with no meaningful decline.  What Mike and
> others pointed out are areas where we should consider investing if we wan=
t
> to *increase* the popularity beyond what it already is (which is what
> happened with Python).
>
> Zeev
>

While I think some excellent suggestions have been made on this thread, one
thing that I feel Mike's sources show (and maybe it's confirmation bias) is
that any decline in popularity that PHP might be experiencing (for the sake
of argument, we'll pretend such a decline does exist) isn't because PHP
isn't strict enough. It's because it doesn't do a lot of the things that
languages like Python can do. If this is the case, we don't reverse the
trend by making our language more syntactically or behaviorally like the
other languages out there. We reverse it by supporting the features that
are currently lacking, or, adding features that other languages don't have.



--=20
Chase Peeler
chasepeeler@gmail.com

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