[PunchTornado]

> PHP is having trouble keeping up with modern language

which are these modern languages and which are the cases where it is not keeping up?

IMO PHP is one of the languages where development is really quick and the ecosystem is flourishing.

[mattigames]

A great way to look into the future of languages is checking how many people is learning it now compared to the last few years, a great tool for that is google trends and things don't look good for PHP: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=p...

[colecut]

There is also this to consider

https://haydenjames.io/80-percent-web-powered-by-php/

[The_Amp_Walrus]

> Today, PHP is used by more than 80% of all the websites _whose server-side programming language we know_

I find it pretty annoying that they don't post stats on the websites that they couldn't classify. I think it's likely that their survey suffers from some level of survivorship bias: only websites that loudly announce their tech stack get counted.

So, how do they know which programming language is being used by a server? From https://w3techs.com/faq, they look at:

- HTML elements of web pages

- Specific HTML tags, for example the generator meta tag

- The URL structure of a site

- HTTP headers, for example cookies

- HTTP responses to specific requests, for example compression

I typically run Python / Django sites, and the only way, that you would know I'm running Python is a few Django-specific security/auth cookies. _Maybe_ that stuff gets picked up by their crawler. If I was running another Python web framework, like Flask, then you'd have no idea what kind of app server was sitting behind NGINX.

[chc]

I suspect an enormous number of those are WordPress blogs and MediaWiki sites, and I don't feel like that number is very useful without breaking those out. It's a bit like saying Fortran is popular in data science because SciPy is implemented partly in Fortran — not so much an indicator of overall language health as it is an artifact of one product's popularity.

[PunchTornado]

By your tool, then it means that javascript is dying: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=j...

Would you say that JS is dying?

Not to mention Java, which from Google trends it looks like it's an elephant half-way to the cemetery already https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=j...

[ceejayoz]

I'm not sure that's a great way to evaluate things.

Add in "Laravel" and things look pretty different: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=p...

I know I personally steer any newbie away from Googling up "php tutorial" - most of them are horrible, full of bad coding practices and vulnerabilities. I steer them to a good framework and suggest they peruse its docs.

[CydeWeys]

This is a more fair comparison: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=p...

You can't just compare searches for tutorials on one platform against an entire other platform itself like that.

The vast, vast majority of PHP out there does not use Laravel.

[TigerHimself]

So you are saying that PHP is dying since 2004. That’s ridiculous. There are new languages and more alternatives today that’s it.

[crimsonalucard]

It just takes a long time for certain things to die.

[quickben]

That argument can be made from the other side about golang being artificially kept alive by Google.

The comparison isn't on equal footing.

[crimsonalucard]

Is golang dying? Is it losing steam at all?

[spejic88]

so are you saying that for javascript the things are not looking good as well ?

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=p...

[mattigames]

Not really, its a complex issue, look how five years ago "PHP tutorial" was more searched than JS tutorial but this year "JS tutorial" has almost the double than PHP: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...