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PHP Becoming More Popular

Posted by michael on from the jack-of-all-trades dept.

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.'"

5 of 44 comments (clear)

  1. It is not surprising... by downward+dog · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...that PHP is becoming more popular. It is fast, can be developed quickly, uses familiar C style syntax, and was designed from the ground up to be a web language (unlike Perl et al). For about 90% of web applications, PHP is perfect.

    What is surprising to me is that PHP has a rating of 9.5%, while Perl has a rating of 7.4% (declining).

  2. Follow-up by downward+dog · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Looking at SkillMarket, there are far more Perl jobs than PHP (2629 vs 312). Why the discrepancy between SkillMarket and TIOBE?

    From TIOBE's ratings explanation:
    The ratings are based on the world-wide availability of skilled engineers, courses and third party vendors.

    It could be:
    1. That PHP is more popular outside of the US (and SkillMarket only tracks US jobs).
    2. That PHP generates approximately the same number of courses, books, etc. than Perl does. After all, if there are 9x as many Perl jobs as there are PHP jobs, that doesn't mean that there would be 9x as many Perl books or courses as there are PHP books or courses.
    3. Perhaps PHP has more of a following among amateurs - hobbyists who build web applications, but don't hold jobs as PHP programmers.

    1. Re:Follow-up by Saeed+al-Sahaf · · Score: 4, Insightful
      Looking at SkillMarket, there are far more Perl jobs than PHP (2629 vs 312). Why the discrepancy between SkillMarket and TIOBE?

      Because while Perl has been in widespread use professionally for a log long time ("Perl is dieing, Netcraft confirms it..."), and so there are a large number of IT professionals that use Perl, PHP has only recently been taken seriously by enterprise class developers, and so has not yet built the volume of qualified professionals yet. It's that simple, no mysteries, no misinterpretations, nothing to see, move along.

      --
      "Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
  3. "Positive Delta" ?!?! by zaqattack911 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    cmon man... just cuz you're a slashdottin' geek, does it mean you're not allowed to use normal english?

  4. Cuanto me buscan no estoy by RAMMS+EIN · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Heh, PHP is rising in popularity, just as I'm moving away from it. Seems I still manage to avoid the mainstream languages. :-) Or maybe it's just that I know more now than 5 years ago...

    Seriously, when I first learned PHP, I thought it was the best. Here's a language specifically intended for web development, with familiar syntax and function names, and support for everything you might need.

    These days, I think PHP is an inflexible language, full of kludges to make up for it. I've grown to dislike C syntax, and I also feel the typical (in PHP) mixing of PHP and HTML is bad (what if you want to generate a different output format?).

    Also, I have learned that good general purpose languages can often be used instead of a given special purpose language. About the only requirement is that the language be flexible enough, and has the needed libraries. There are several languages that fit the bill for web development (Ruby, Python, Common Lisp, Perl, ...)

    --
    Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.