Outside of "the bubble" the web is basically made of php and perl. Its like the dark matter of the internet. If you want to reach all they way down to the weekend dabbler, you really need to choose one of those 2, and of those 2, php seems more immediately accessible.
I think you'll find that graphs like that are meaningless. I work for an agency that does mostly PHP work, and we never advertise, because for common skills like PHP, recruiters and potential hires inundate us with calls every single day. I expect the very common skills like PHP are severely under-represented in ads for this reason. For less common skills, you need to advertise, as people won't know where to go.
Presumably because of how many webhosts have it available automatically.
I'd pondered a flat file based php 'blog' engine once - with all the benefits of markdown or whatever - no database complexity, easily rsyncable for deployment, git can keep revisions, etc...
Yep - and there's also some benefits performance and security wise to not having any serverside code at all (other than nginx, or whatever).
The problems you have with jekyll, pelican, et al is that you lose site-side search, 'related posts' (without some reasonably complex compile-side clobber), etc. etc.
Using extremely minimal PHP lets you deploy just as easily, you don't get too much of a performance hit (a hell of a lot better than wordpress, etc), you can still do search, related posts, forms, embedding, and all that.
PHP as a server-side 'clever templating' language really isn't that bad. It's only awful when used to build anything massivly complex (such as joomla! or drupal...), and that it encourages messy project design.
> PHP as a server-side 'clever templating' language really isn't that bad.
I only touch PHP as little as possible, and work with a legacy PHP codebase, but AFAIK, it hasn't evolved a tag to automatically HTML-escape/JSON-escape content. So, it's as good a templating language as it is a programming language: pretty terrible. I'll trade PHP for something as barebones as Python with WSGI + Jinja2 any day.
What's not fair about it when talking about PHP as a templating language? My point is that while PHP is often lambasted as a terrible programming language, people forget that its HTML templating part is even more abysmal. If you need to have a templating system in your "advanced templating language", this really tells you everything you need to know about its capabilities.
To be honest, not implying you're wrong, but you could have "related posts" with pre-computation, and "site-side search" with a mix of pre-computed data structures and front-end Javascript (which could be quite efficient, provided the blog is not too large).
HTMLy has a built-in search feature and related posts. I use file-naming convention than the speed always fast even though let say the blog has about 3k of posts with hundreds of tags, why? HTMLy don't read the content first but filter it first. I already test it with mini VPS (RAM 128 MB) and no speed penalty.
Interesting choice. A lot of places still use it, but it definitely feels dirty. Not the kind of thing you usually see around here. While it is still used a lot, I have to say, when I saw PHP I immediately closed GitHub.
Do you close your browser when you find out it is written in C++? Or shut down your OS when you find out it is written in C? Or angrily close the browser tab when you find out something on the page uses JavaScript? Do you then go and wash your hands and wipe the nervous sweat from your brow?
If a tool gets a job done, does the language matter?
No language is perfect. I know PHP feels "dirty" but the misuse of it is likely the cause of widespread disparaging. Even the English language is not perfect. Does this stop you using it?
Just a thought. I tend to close tabs when I come across stuff written in languages I can't write in... :-)