[chrisandchris]

Saying 77% of the web is run by PHP and concluding therefore that PHP is well-liked for websites is like telling most of banking is run in COBOL and therefore COBOL is well-liked for banking.

The conclusion has no coherence to the source.

I guess that most of the web runs on PHP (because it runs on Wordpress) if counted by page-view. But I'm not sure that's the proper measure.

[gregjor]

In default configuration PHP identifies itself in response headers, but you can turn that off. People who know how to set up and administer web back ends generally do that from a security best practice checklist. So if anything PHP runs more sites than the number discovered crawling the web looking for identifying evidence.

Wordpress and similar CMSs, e-commerce platforms, and the Laravel framework give themselves away in other ways that take more work to hide. Likewise non-PHP back-ends have easy to see fingerprints in the headers and page source. There’s no reason to think PHP appears to dominate because crawlers can easily identify PHP but can’t identify other back-ends.

Banks and large companies with large COBOL code bases mainly maintain their legacy code, they don’t write a lot of new code in COBOL or RPG. And you won’t find COBOL powering web sites, which makes the argument irrelevant to the topic. The last time I worked on a big legacy back-end I was putting a web front end on it, using PHP and ColdFusion.