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PHP Becoming More Popular
IO ERROR pastes "'PHP has earned the title "Programming Language of the Year 2004" with a positive delta of more than 3 percent within 1 year. The launch of PHP version 5 is generally regarded as a further step to maturity. It is expected that PHP will be capable to maintain its top 4 position for a long time,' according to the TIOBE Programming Community Index. 'The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the world-wide availability of skilled engineers, courses and third party vendors.'"
According to the data on my SkillMarket site, php (on the languages page) is holding steady. The data tracked is a bit different, however (Job listings vs search engines hits).
Software Wars
PHP is easier to learn than perl, so more newbs are using it. That explains a lot of it. You know, considering all of the hacks out there that have been launched against PHP (even due to problems in the core of PHP itself), I would never consider using it for an important part of business.
PHP just feels too... play-skool for me. PHP is like blogger. If you don't have the ability to figure out how to install or make your own CMS, you create an ccount at blogger. Likewise, if you don't have the skill to learn and write code that can do something without having it handed to you on a platter ala Apple style, you use PHP.
Not to mention, PHP still just feels totally undeveloped. I gave up after figuring out how to seperate everything from the presentation. PHP likes to integrate things a bit too much... also, their postgresql interopability is very limited. If they had much better postgres support, I **MIGHT** consider it with more weight.
Oh come on... If you are witing ugly PHP code then you don't know the language.
Have a JAVA/.NET developer look at PHP5 and they'll tell you how it exudes enterprise level features.
Add Smarty and PEAR to the mix and you have one hell of a platform.