Why PHP Usage Has Declined by 40% in Just Over 2 Years

tsonfeir, 5 months ago

PHP is great when you use it right. The problem is, most people don’t use it right. That old way of rendering html through PHP, or worse, injecting PHP into html, is antiquated.

IMO, PHP is a great language to use for making your backend API. Use whatever flavor of the week on your front end.

Olissipo, 5 months ago

Aren’t you only saying, indirectly, that server-side rendering is “antiquated”?

Unless you mean that mixing logic with templates is bad, in which case I agree.

tsonfeir, 5 months ago

Well, both?

There’s always a use for server rendered html. Maybe JavaScript is an issue. But it’s usually not. The list is pretty short though.

I can’t think of many situations where I would say yes if I asked myself “if you could re-do the system today, would you still choose server-rendered html?”

I’m sure other people have use cases where it would make sense. I build admin utilities and ERP stuff.

Olissipo, 5 months ago

That’s a valid opinion. And I admit that at some point you must move to some form of client-side rendering.

I still haven’t (for some admin panels too, and websites), so I don’t feel the need to switch.

tsonfeir, 5 months ago

Well, if it ain’t broke, and you’re not getting paid to refactor it, don’t fix it.

spartanatreyu, 6 months ago

TIOBE index, literally in the first sentence…

PHP leaves a bad taste in my mouth and I’d be happier if we were rid of it (or it continued changing for the next 10 years), but even I can see this article is worthless.

thesystemisdown, 6 months ago

That article makes little sense. There is not a non-php version of WordPress at this time. I know Gutenberg uses Node and NPM, but the heavy lifting is still PHP. There has always been client side scripting and server side scripting with WP. I’ll buy that devs are lobbying clients to use something else, but to say this is because WordPress is driving the change can’t be right.

Emperor, 6 months ago

That article makes little sense.

Yes, they seem to have WP blinkers on.

It is far more likely that this is from the rise of “sexier” server-side coding languages like Rust. Now I don’t know much about Rust (although I will look into it more) but I a bit of Googling on Rust vs PHP a while back and PHP is still a solid choice for a lot of things and there seem to be a lot more people out there who can code in it, making it a.good choice for FOSS projects.

TWeaK, 6 months ago

I hate JavaScript, along with the whole of web 2.0 and moving shit around as it loads, making the user wait to input rather than taking the input and processing as quickly as possible, and in general the whole theme of software no longer being designed for the user to use but for the publisher to extract value from the user.