Whether PHP runs 77% or 69% of public web sites, how does that offend anyone or make them feel insecure? No one is trying to "prove" anything, there's no race to the one ultimate tech stack that requires winners and losers. You can accept the fact that PHP objectively runs a large majority of public web sites without interpreting that as a threat to your choices, your job, your image of yourself as a professional.
Having so much PHP out there may look like a problem, but programmers attaching their ego and identity to languages and tools and frameworks accounts for a lot more wasted time and crappy code than a popular language that has some obvious and well-known flaws.
As someone whose most devices are USB-C 3.0+ for the past few years and never need to think about speed, I have to say this comment is hilarious.
Bad news, barely anyone is even thinking about it. There are one or two players that are trying to build a new browser from scratch, but they are far from mainstream and nobody knows how long these efforts will exist.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do new things but I think as developers we’re prone to underestimate the cost pretty heavily.
> PHP is used by 77% of all the websites whose server-side programming language we know.
I had a quick look at the methodology section, but it’s not clear to me how accurate this data is. Determining whether a site uses PHP can be relatively straightforward (especially with default extensions / if Wordpress is used / etc), but if a site (potentially using a different language) is behind a reverse proxy/uses an API/etc then it is less clear. Does anyone know whether PHP is over-represented in the results because it’s easy to identify?
No doubt PHP is still huge, but 77% seems almost too huge. There is also a very good chance that PHP is actually that big and I’m just in a different crowd.
Also I want to point out that almost any time people quote number about PHP's popularity, this is the only number, which is strange -- for metrics like iOS market share you can always find multiple numbers from multiple sources which don't fully agree with each other but are within a certain range. Not for this PHP number. In other words, w3tech's number is not cross validated by any other source. I wouldn't use it to "prove" anything.
The program takes jobs away from Americans and should be illegal.
I want to work with people from my town, not people from halfway across the world.
Many countries offer work visas (for many good reasons), although they are often used in unintended ways. It is very much a stretch to say these programs shouldn't exist at all because they "take away" jobs.
Also, if half of the people you work with are on H1B, very likely you are not in a midwest "town" with 3,000 population, but rather a decent metropolitan area with a large immigration population, and the company you work is of decent size. I wouldn't be surprised if even half of the Americans in your company relocated from a different "town".
Finally, I like working with people that are productive and easy to communicate, instead of looking at which country they come from or their visa status. If anything that's my boss's concern.
Therefore, if you want to actually see any change, maybe (1) become the CEO of your company, fire all H1B and only hire US citizens (2) join a different company (3) start your own company, or at least (4) call your senator and advocate for anti-immigration bills, or sue USCIS, instead of posting these useless and borderline racist comments on HN.
I mean... most of my daily effort goes into supporting a bank. There's A LOT of mainframe stuff. Some COBOL. Some guys using AIX (actually, a surprising number of guys using AIX) and (as mentioned previously, xterms and emacs or vi.) On the dev side there's more focus on file format standards than tools. So use whatever tool that generates files in the appropriate format. We probably could use Win11, but they started using AIX in the 90s and just never got around to moving to Windows.