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PHP Programming

PHP Becoming More Popular 44

Posted by michael from the jack-of-all-trades dept.
IO ERROR pastes "'PHP has earned the title "Programming Language of the Year 2004" with a positive delta of more than 3 percent within 1 year. The launch of PHP version 5 is generally regarded as a further step to maturity. It is expected that PHP will be capable to maintain its top 4 position for a long time,' according to the TIOBE Programming Community Index. 'The index is updated once a month. The ratings are based on the world-wide availability of skilled engineers, courses and third party vendors.'"
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PHP Becoming More Popular More

PHP Becoming More Popular

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  • SkillMarket disagrees... (Score:5, Informative)

    by mshiltonj ( 220311 ) <mshiltonj&gmail,com> on Thursday January 06, 2005 @10:06AM (#11275260) Homepage Journal
    According to the data on my SkillMarket [mshiltonj.com] site, php (on the languages page [mshiltonj.com]) is holding steady. The data tracked is a bit different, however (Job listings vs search engines hits).
  • I have to say im happy about java going down, but about perl, i feel quite the opposite. mod_perl is still the best tool for me - thanks to the flexibility - not php.

  • It is not surprising... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by downward dog ( 634625 ) on Thursday January 06, 2005 @10:14AM (#11275367) Homepage
    ...that PHP is becoming more popular. It is fast, can be developed quickly, uses familiar C style syntax, and was designed from the ground up to be a web language (unlike Perl et al). For about 90% of web applications, PHP is perfect.

    What is surprising to me is that PHP has a rating of 9.5%, while Perl has a rating of 7.4% (declining).

    • Follow-up (Score:3, Insightful)

      by downward dog ( 634625 )
      Looking at SkillMarket, there are far more Perl jobs than PHP (2629 vs 312). Why the discrepancy between SkillMarket and TIOBE?

      From TIOBE's ratings explanation:
      The ratings are based on the world-wide availability of skilled engineers, courses and third party vendors.

      It could be:
      1. That PHP is more popular outside of the US (and SkillMarket only tracks US jobs).
      2. That PHP generates approximately the same number of courses, books, etc. than Perl does. After all, if there are 9x as many Perl jobs as there

      • Re:Follow-up (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Saeed al-Sahaf ( 665390 ) on Thursday January 06, 2005 @10:40AM (#11275752) Homepage
        Looking at SkillMarket, there are far more Perl jobs than PHP (2629 vs 312). Why the discrepancy between SkillMarket and TIOBE?

        Because while Perl has been in widespread use professionally for a log long time ("Perl is dieing, Netcraft confirms it..."), and so there are a large number of IT professionals that use Perl, PHP has only recently been taken seriously by enterprise class developers, and so has not yet built the volume of qualified professionals yet. It's that simple, no mysteries, no misinterpretations, nothing to see, move along.

  • "Positive Delta" ?!?! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by zaqattack911 ( 532040 ) on Thursday January 06, 2005 @11:57AM (#11276971) Journal
    cmon man... just cuz you're a slashdottin' geek, does it mean you're not allowed to use normal english?

  • If you look at the hierarchy, you'll see that Perl dropped by 2.14 percent. Python rose by 1.7 percent. This is not a perfect mirror, but it does hint that Python may be sapping a bit of Perl's strength. However, it is just as likely that some of PHP's gains were also at Perl's expense.

    What's weak about my analysis is it assumes that a developer only showcases one skill, which is not the case. That is, this needn't be a zero-sum game.

    Although, I speculate some of the Perl decline is due to PHP's ascendenc

  • Sick of the problems with PHP? Badly implimented APIs, web pages with ugly code buried everyplace doing things that it should be?

    Try PSE [borko.org]! It cures warts, common colds and PHP!

    http://nick.borko.org/pse/ [borko.org]

    Ciao!

    • Sick of the problems with PHP? Badly implimented APIs, web pages with ugly code buried everyplace doing things that it should be?

      Try PSE! It cures warts, common colds and PHP!

      http://nick.borko.org/pse/

      Ciao!

      Oh come on... If you are witing ugly PHP code then you don't know the language.

      Have a JAVA/.NET developer look at PHP5 and they'll tell you how it exudes enterprise level features.

      Add Smarty [php.net] and PEAR [php.net] to the mix and you have one hell of a platform.

      • Oh come on... If you are witing ugly PHP code then you don't know the language.

        Heh, that doesn't really change the argument, does it? PHP I've seen is either: mine or someone else's (or a combination). Mine might be pretty enough, but the vast majority of the code I've seen must have been by people who didn't know the language. Or didn't know how to maintain PHP. Or both.

  • Like all Aspect Oriented [slashdot.org] languages, PHP is a tool for the future ...

    (it's a joke,damnit !)

  • Cuanto me buscan no estoy (Score:3, Insightful)

    by RAMMS+EIN ( 578166 ) on Thursday January 06, 2005 @03:46PM (#11280346) Homepage Journal
    Heh, PHP is rising in popularity, just as I'm moving away from it. Seems I still manage to avoid the mainstream languages. :-) Or maybe it's just that I know more now than 5 years ago...

    Seriously, when I first learned PHP, I thought it was the best. Here's a language specifically intended for web development, with familiar syntax and function names, and support for everything you might need.

    These days, I think PHP is an inflexible language, full of kludges to make up for it. I've grown to dislike C syntax, and I also feel the typical (in PHP) mixing of PHP and HTML is bad (what if you want to generate a different output format?).

    Also, I have learned that good general purpose languages can often be used instead of a given special purpose language. About the only requirement is that the language be flexible enough, and has the needed libraries. There are several languages that fit the bill for web development (Ruby, Python, Common Lisp, Perl, ...)


    • I also feel the typical (in PHP) mixing of PHP and HTML is bad (what if you want to generate a different output format?).

      It is bad! You do not have to mix in emotion. It is a plain fact as soon as you move beyond the simplest applications.

      But that is not the fault of the language, even though PHP more than other languages may encourage this behaviour. You can mix things that should not be mixed in any language.

      You can make your application just as loosely coupled in PHP as you can in most other progra

    • Why would you mix your business logic with your layout just because you're using PHP? If you do you've got no one to blame but yourself. How is this the fault of the language? Just because you can do something doesn't mean it's recomended. I wrote a php templating system if 5 lines of code:

      function include_tpl($file, $vars = array())
      {
      extract($vars);
      include($file);
      }

      there. done. Now you put all your layout in php files maked template and your business logic php code can just include the templates
    • mixing of PHP and HTML is bad (what if you want to generate a different output format?).

      How often does this happen[1]? To make GUI paradigms truly swappable and test that they are swappable is a hell of a lot of work, and can add to a lot of annoying indirection in the code. Also note that HTML is an interface, not an implementation. I agree that details of implementation should be wrapped, but wrapping one high-level interface (HTML) with another is perhaps a waste of time and code.

      [1] In finance, cos
  • I believe that PHP should be taken for what it was meant to be: a flexible web language. Yeah, it can also do some command line scripting, and it can be quite good at it. But just by browsing through php.net and looking at the built-in functions, you can see that it's obviously geared towards web use first and foremost. My website [antsmarching.org] uses PHP exclusively, and we've been able to do some pretty amazingly interactive stuff with it, in combination with MySQL.
  • Every now and then I get a (7 month?) itch to have a closer look at PHP, usually something turns me right off it, like the following:

    PHP in contrast to Perl [tnx.nl]
    Python vs PHP [w4py.org]

    Unless a special purpose language has really good reasons putting it head and shoulders above a general purpose language for a given task, I'll go the general purpose route. I have yet to see the reasons for using PHP stack up to more than 'it handles sessions etc for you' and 'its what every web host offers'. That may be reason enoug

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