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independent web server surveys suggest that IIS 6.0 still powers millions of public websites

Whaa?? Who runs a public web site on a 14-year old version of the server???? That site claims 8 million of them!

Interesting post; however, which language do you utilise/advocate?

The fact that ~80% of the top 1 million web sites are utilising jQuery says a lot about why it became massive - i.e. consistency across browsers, and cuts-down on amount of JavaScript for doing basic things; and massively helps in DOM manipulation.
And as far as I'm aware, Google doesn't utilise jQuery or any javascript libs/frameworks for their websites, including Maps, Gmail, and YouTube.

If you had mentioned some of the newer retarded frameworks, such as Angular, React, Vue, etc, then I would have been in complete agreement!

I'm also surprised you took a swing at W3C, of all, who are trying to make the web sane and standard tech across browsers, along with Mozilla.

And by the way, not all front-end devs are idiots, some come from C/Java back-end languages.

Adsense is by far the most-used advertising provider, providing 46% of all ads internet-wide. Doubleclick is in second place at 4%.

https://trends.builtwith.com/ads (click "entire internet" on the right)

He didn't say jQuery is dead now. It's still used on a huge number of websites: https://trends.builtwith.com/j...

If people are migrating to FreeBSD, why are there no stats that supports this claim?

When you look at BuiltWith:
BuiltWith OS statistics
I don't see a big upsurge of FreeBSD, at least not what I would expect. Around October 2015 it was gaining users/servers, but it is now slowly declining.

In fact, I don't think people are migrating that much to FreeBSD. I think Debian is slowly losing ground. The rock-solid reputation of Debian is no longer true. I don't know what happened, but I think they didn't gain the quality that other distro's gained the last years. Their migration to systemd was quite a disaster.
If you'd run RedHat you will have quite a different experience. I run Mageia now, and systemd is not really a problem here. They seem to have handled that migration quite well.

According to The Next Web, WordPress topped the chart of platforms that experienced the most breaches (almost half of all attacks). English websites experienced the most attacks, with Chinese, German, Japanese and Russian language websites following closely behind.

Uh... http://trends.builtwith.com/cm...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_used_on_the_Internet

Wordpress is the single most used CMS on the web and English is the most used language. The hijack rate corresponds closely to that. So Wordpress haters, go away before you open your mouth. I see more computers with Norton also have viruses. This stands to reason due to its market share. Does this mean norton doesn't suck, no. But raw numbers are misleading. WordPress may suck, but the primary thing is not updating, using poorly written and unmaintained modules/plugins and crossing your fingers. This is a recipe for disaster on any system.

What we need is people to take ownership of their systems, be it a PC or a website or anything else. This however takes time, thought and money. People want cheap and now, so they hire a cheap designer, pay for a cheap hosting platform, then wonder why the iranian datacoders league defaced their site with militant Islamic messages, or elitehackers.ru is delivering cryptolocker with theit webserver.

Professionalism has costs in dollars and other resources. Do not be surprised when you skimp.

Well, for example you can use builtwith.com. E.g. http://builtwith.com/adafruit.com

Well, for example you can use builtwith.com. E.g. http://builtwith.com/adafruit.com

The "major decline" you and everyone else has been on about nearly a decade just hasn't happened.

The decline of Flash is proceeding at a steady pace. You can't argue with the trend. It has happened.

Here are a couple of charts which illustrate the decline of Flash usage on websites. One from Built With and one from W3Techs. The trend is decidedly downwards.

"When you run across an article like the fractal article, which is absolutely abysmal, you feel like you've hit on something akin to real research. It's not. (You'll find many of his facts are flat-out wrong, and the bulk of the article is completely unsubstantiated opinion.) Even worse, it actively discourages you from using your critical thinking skills to make an objective evaluation."

We don't seem to be getting anywhere. You're still parroting the same old thing whilst evading backing it up by explaining where exactly it is wrong. I've been asking you for an objective evaluation all along, that's been the very point of every one of my posts - to get an objective evaluation from you, but you just cannot provide one can you?

"I honestly don't see anything wrong with that. I'll also note that most (if not all) of the "real-world" development stuff you run across is worse than useless"

That doesn't make any sense. How can real world stuff be useless? By definition real world stuff is stuff that's used in the real world, and hence, not useless. I don't have any inherent problem with the academic view of the world, as long as there's recognition that it doesn't necessarily play out in practice. Case in point I had a grouchy old comp. sci. professor who declared his distaste for the fact that proof by induction wasn't carried out on every bit of code on earth to make better more secure software - that's a great theory but if we did that then we'd never actually get anything done. Theory isn't fact, and fact can diverge from theory in practice, that's something academics can sometimes get wrong. Even your signature highlights this- as awful as OO might be, it's still been better than anything else for actually getting most software built in practice over the last 20 years so someone like Djiksta can rally against it all he wants (though I hear that quote actually never came from him anyway) but it doesn't change the fact that there's been no better alternatives for practical large scale development until recently.

"consider that PHP powers >80% of websites (a link for you) not just small sites"

I'm glad you finally tried to justify at least one of your points, but by way of objectivity one has to consider why that's so massively contradicted by for example this site which puts it at only 18.6% marketshare:

http://trends.builtwith.com/fr...

We need something more transparent with it's data, neither of these sites are. Putting that aside and giving your link the benefit of doubt for now, even your link highlights the fact that PHP is mostly powering small sites - it's bottom of the list by measurement of how much it's used in high traffic sites. This reiterates the point that it's mostly just used for unimportant stuff, more often than not PHP's growth comes from installations of things like Drupal or Wordpress for personal sites that just end up getting left to rot, which is fine, but it means much of it's usage has nothing to do with how much it's being used as a language for software development. Installation of a copy of Drupal is not the same as writing any actual PHP code.

In my strong opinion, PHP is on the way out [...] Government choosing to go with PHP is like government sticking with COBOL

Making things up is fun and all, but PHP is the most popular language on the internet, and shows no signs of decreased usage whatsoever.

So in the light of actual data, your "strong opinion" that it's like COBOL and "on the way out", is fucking moronic.

There's plenty of valid reasons to criticize PHP, but this isn't one of them.

In my strong opinion, PHP is on the way out [...] Government choosing to go with PHP is like government sticking with COBOL

Making things up is fun and all, but PHP is the most popular language on the internet, and shows no signs of decreased usage whatsoever.

So in the light of actual data, your "strong opinion" that it's like COBOL and "on the way out", is fucking moronic.

There's plenty of valid reasons to criticize PHP, but this isn't one of them.

If you only know Apache thats all you see acctually according to some websites IIS is the fastest growing. http://trends.builtwith.com/Web%20Server/growth#!sixMonths With nearly 10x more users than 6 months before, you are also hard pressed to find a graph which shows less than 40% IIS usage.

Step outside your bubble before you make huge sweeping statements like this.

Unfortunately the stats you refer to are for IIS8, and are linked to a corresponding decline in IIS6 as people upgrade. If you look at the stats for all versions of IIS on the site you link you will see that far from being the fastest growing, IIS usage as a whole is slowly declining.

If you only know Apache thats all you see acctually according to some websites IIS is the fastest growing. http://trends.builtwith.com/Web%20Server/growth#!sixMonths With nearly 10x more users than 6 months before, you are also hard pressed to find a graph which shows less than 40% IIS usage.

Step outside your bubble before you make huge sweeping statements like this.

Unfortunately the stats you refer to are for IIS8, and are linked to a corresponding decline in IIS6 as people upgrade. If you look at the stats for all versions of IIS on the site you link you will see that far from being the fastest growing, IIS usage as a whole is slowly declining.

If you only know Apache thats all you see acctually according to some websites IIS is the fastest growing. http://trends.builtwith.com/Web%20Server/growth#!sixMonths With nearly 10x more users than 6 months before, you are also hard pressed to find a graph which shows less than 40% IIS usage.

Step outside your bubble before you make huge sweeping statements like this.

Unfortunately the stats you refer to are for IIS8, and are linked to a corresponding decline in IIS6 as people upgrade. If you look at the stats for all versions of IIS on the site you link you will see that far from being the fastest growing, IIS usage as a whole is slowly declining.

Listing a bunch of frameworks is less than meaningless. It looks meaningful which is in itself more misleading. You need to put numbers up to make your point meaningful. For example builtwith.com has a page on web framework usage. They have a list on the right with a breakdown of the web frameworks used on the top 10,000 sites. There are 38 frameworks listed. Keeping with the 80/20 rule, 83% of the web sites use only 21% of available number of frameworks listed. I will grant that their interpretation what constitutes a web framework could be debated to a limited degree, but it, and more importantly, the numbers it provides is good enough to prove my point: "the model only supports a small number of top dogs."

So I believe my point is still valid: there are a very small number of web frameworks in practical use.

To show I am not the only one thinking this, here is a fellow who says the same thing in a slightly different way. Two of four key points he makes are the same as what I am saying:

Other important factors I consider include:

• Quality and availability of libraries.
• Quality of tools like IDEs, debuggers, automation systems.
• Size and healthy of the active community using the framework. (i.e. If I run into a problem, how easy is it to google the answer?)
• Ease of hiring people who already know the platform.

All of these considerations are IMHO more important than compiled vs. interpreted or run-time performance or whether the language is statically typed or dynamically typed, or even if itâ(TM)s open source vs. proprietary technology. But there is a single common factor which directly feeds into all four of the criteria I list above: How many people are actively using the platform?

N.B. my emphasis on the last sentence in the quoted text.

It is like 'freedom' in the 'democratic' countries. Ostensibly, we are free to do as we please. But without money the practicality is limited. Or in other words, if you don't have money, you can't be as free as those that do (and no, not everyone can be rich/above average... which means not everyone has that ability). In the old communist countries, you couldn't travel anywhere without permission. Here you can't travel anywhere without money (plane tickets, or gas, or food, or shelter... if you can't afford them you aren't free to travel). The same with frameworks. You have to be able to use a framework that someone cares to pay you for in order to make a living and survive, so your choices are limited, even if theoretically they are limitless.

If you can believe this metric, http://trends.builtwith.com/javascript, jQuery is used in over 40% of the top websites. It has a strong developer community and is well-documented for the most part.

The book does not devote too many pages on jQuery, but it makes a few mentions.

Look at who started using Drupal in the last year or two: The Economist, The Grammys, Fast Company, The Examiner, House.gov (and all ~535 house websites) recently moved to Drupal, Energy.gov, WhiteHouse.gov, and here's a list of some 120 national governments using Drupal.

But hey, Drupal only has 2% market share of all sites on the web, is being adopted by government and corporate organizations at a maddening pace, and just had their first major release in 3 years. There's no reason why this Drupal shit should be discussed on Slashdot.

Perl 5 has lost almost all of its share of powering the web, http://trends.builtwith.com/framework/Perl

Scalable code can be written in any language, that's a question of architecture not a function of language choice. Any scalable algorithm can be realized in any language.

Loading as much as possible into a single line is a recipe for hard to maintain and buggy code.

Yea, I'd say so: J2EE Statistics. Considering it's more fitting for larger clustered applications I'm actually surprised it shows up as high as it does on there. It's definately not the choice technology to crank out a quick lightweight webpage but for larger projects with interconnected applications J2EE fills in nicely.