I also don't agree with the index and all its statistics, yet I'm not invalidating it as it is a much-viewed index globally.
Though, what caught my eyes was this quote which I thought would be obvious and Mike would have based those fact replies on(Yet I'm also not invalidating his facts list and IMHO those as well would make sense in PHP). According to the index : "Till the end of 2009 everything went fine, but soon after that PHP was going downhill from 10% to 5% market share in 2 years’ time. In 2014 it halved again to 2.5%. So what happened to PHP? >From its start PHP was the Visual Basic for web design: easy to learn, easy to deploy, but mainly used by web designers with a limited software engineering background. The downside of PHP’s simplicity was that it was relatively easy to shoot security holes in it. PHP has been struggling with this for a long time. In 2014 PHP’s biggest supporter Facebook launched Hack as an alternative for PHP because it was not scalable. And after that, JavaScript, TypeScript and Python became the linguas franca for web development." These lines caught my eye more than the rest of the quote : "The downside of PHP’s simplicity was that it was relatively easy to shoot security holes in it. PHP has been struggling with this for a long time." These other quotes seems good to watch as it mention one of the biggest supporters creating an alternative because PHP wasn't scalable at its current growth stage, maybe we might have been bothering too much about the past while not remembering the present and future(Which is 100s of years to come, if PHP is still a thing on the top 50) matters most than the past(which is just some 15-20 years gone) : " In 2014 PHP’s biggest supporter Facebook launched Hack as an alternative for PHP because it was not scalable. And after that, JavaScript, TypeScript and Python became the linguas franca for web development" On Sun, Sep 15, 2019, 8:18 AM Zeev Suraski <z...@php.net> wrote: > > > On Sun, Sep 15, 2019 at 6:33 AM Mike Schinkel <mikeschin...@gmail.com> > wrote: > >> > On Sep 14, 2019, at 5:18 PM, Olumide Samson <oludons...@gmail.com> >> wrote: >> > >> > https://jaxenter.com/php-tiobe-sept-2019-162096.html >> > I think this is one of those things we get from voting no... >> > >> > I might be wrong anyways :-? >> > > First of all, Olumide, this is in fact wrong, although the general topic > (language popularity and the reasons to it) is definitely worthy of > discussion. > > The reason it's wrong is that TIOBE is a meaningless 'index' with a > methodology that's not only questionable - but is rather downright > idiotic. It's not just off or inaccurate - it's practically a random > number generator. > See for yourself: > https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/programming-languages-definition/ > > The RedMonk Language Rankings has a much more reasonable methodology, is a > lot more stable, and there, PHP is repeatedly at the top 5 languages and > not losing any steam in both absolute and comparative measures: > https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2019/07/18/language-rankings-6-19/ > > >> If those specific rankings are legitimately a cause for concern then it >> would make sense to do some objective analysis to determine why the >> languages that are growing marketshare are growing. >> > > Mike - even though specifically the TIOBE index isn't a cause for > virtually anything, the rest of your analysis is still relevant - as the > key takeaway you're basing it on - Python's growth - is also reflected in > RedMonk rankings. > > Thomas - I also wholeheartedly agree with your suggestion. That's why we > worked on FFI - to open the door for PHP to enter new areas. Even JIT is, > for the most part, not really relevant to the common Web case and would be > a lot more impactful in other types of workloads. And there may be other > things we can do. But you're right - if we don't find a way to position it > for these use cases in people's minds - it won't move the needle. > > Zeev >
