[hexa22]

How much of this is just the millions of Wordpress or Nextcloud installations? I’d be more interested in knowing how many unique apps or developers work on each language because in my experience I haven’t actually seen a single php developer other than Wordpress tweakers.

[mfer]

There are a lot of WordPress sites. The same site reporting the metrics on PHP also points out that WordPress is 42.5% of all sites [1].

That being said, I know a fair number of PHP developers. None of them are in SV or Seattle. They are in cities many have not heard of. They're all over. Some do public sites. Some do company internal web apps.

Take a project like Symfony, a PHP framework. It's popular but not the most popular. Now, take a look at the download stats for its packages [2]. They are large.

There is software development happening all over the world. A bunch of it is in PHP.

[1] https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-wordpress

[2] https://packagist.org/?query=symfony

[danaris]

> That being said, I know a fair number of PHP developers. None of them are in SV or Seattle. > There is software development happening all over the world.

I think this is probably the biggest part of the HN bubble: the idea that "tech hubs" like Silicon Valley make up all, or a supermajority, of tech workers.

I've never even visited the west coast, never lived in a town larger than about 20k people, and frankly never really want to live in a city. Yet I work in tech, and have my entire adult life. (At this point, I am, in fact, primarily a PHP programmer.)

And I'm hardly an exception.

Nearly every company over a handful of employees needs tech support, programming, a website, even servers managed. Many of these will hire internally. Others will turn to contractors—who are also locals.

Silicon Valley, with its high concentration of tech workers and ludicrous salaries, is very much the exception here, and a lot of HNers would do well to remember that, lest they end up looking as out of touch with the real world as Lucille Bluth asking about the price of a banana. [0]

[0] https://media1.giphy.com/media/yJu2jIQZgPubm/giphy.gif

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I live in NY, but am not part of the NY "tech scene," because I find they are not particularly welcoming to me. I won’t go where I’m not wanted.

Not really a big deal. I'm pretty cutting edge, on the frontend (native apps for Apple systems, in Swift), but a bit stodgier on the backend (I use PHP). I’m not surprised at all by the survey results.

PHP works great for me. If I need something different (not an issue, so far), I'll hire it in. I'm actually fairly good at big projects in PHP. My code is maintainable and high-quality. It may not be “leet” PHP, but it works well.

Here’s an article about this kind of thing, that is a bit “meta”: https://veekaybee.github.io/2019/05/10/java8/

[megous]

There are plenty of custom PHP websites and devs that write them. I, too, still write fully custom (no framework) PHP webapps for customers where I don't expect to be babysitting the app after it's written, and where websockets and real-time interactivity is not necessary.

PHP is great fit for that, because all dependencies are part of the system updates in that case.

[goldcd]

Yes - I wrote a messageboard in PHP 18 years ago whilst clutching an OReilly book in my hand. It's definitely not well coded, but it works. It's moved servers many times, changed OS, Webserver - and it's now running on my NAS. I've maybe twice had to spend an afternoon tightening it up due to some PHP change - but broadly been maintenance/issue free.

For at least the last decade I've been pondering re-implementing it in some fancy new language - but as it just keeps working, it slides down the priority list.

[taylodl]

That's the "secret" of PHP. It's 20 years later and it just works. Many other front-end development tools and frameworks have come and gone in that timeframe yet PHP persists. Why? Well, I'm not a PHP expert but it sounds like they care about backwards compatibility. You don't have to continually reimplement everything all the time, which both costs money and discourages further investment. There are reasons COBOL is still around 50+ years later.

[codegeek]

"because in my experience I haven’t actually seen a single php developer "

With all due respect, that is one hell of a bubble :). Plenty of companies use PHP (not just WordPress) and there are plenty of PHP devs who work with core, symfony, Laravel etc.

PHP is battle tested and even though it has its quirks, you can never go wrong with it if you are looking to build a web application.

P.S: We are hiring web developers for our company and PHP experience is preferred considering our stack.

[sstephant]

I worked almost 10 years doing PHP. Only corporate apps (backoffices/frontoffices/services/batches, monitoring CO2 for train transports, GPS , invoices, train orders, electronic consignment notes ,sso&subscriber management for a magazine, bridges... ), not a single WordPress. So at some point there were PHP developers and I met many. I lost interest in PHP when the industry moved to REST APIs and SPA though.

[ransom1538]

Facebook (PHP/HHVM), Slack, Wikipedia, Esty are quite large with a ton of PHP devs. None of them are wordpress tweakers. PHP devs are out there! (Me!)

[jonwinstanley]

I do PHP and haven't touched Wordpress for years. Laravel and Symfony are great projects for building web apps with.

[lowercased]

> because in my experience I haven’t actually seen a single php developer other than Wordpress tweakers.

I think your experience is probably limited then. Or you're not looking for them. ??

[tored]

Nice to meet you.

[dubcanada]

You've never seen a PHP developer?