JetBrains Survey Declares PHP Declining, Then Says It Isn't

JetBrains released its annual State of the Developer Ecosystem survey in late October, drawing more than twenty-four thousand responses from programmers worldwide. The survey declared that PHP and Ruby are in "long term decline" based on usage trends tracked over five years. Shortly after publication, JetBrains posted a separate statement asserting that "PHP remains a stable, professional, and evolving ecosystem." The company offered no explanation for the apparent contradiction, The Register reports.

The survey's methodology involves weighting responses to account for bias toward JetBrains users and regional distribution factors. The company acknowledges some bias likely remains since its own customers are more inclined to respond. The survey also found that 85% of developers now use AI coding tools.

PHP not dying yet?

[Quakeulf]

Last time I did PHP was in 2007. JS is so powerful now that it's all I need for webdev.

Re:

[sg_oneill]

Last time I did PHP was in 2007. JS is so powerful now that it's all I need for webdev.

The gnarl toothed beast is still lurking around, but its mostly just used for hosting wordpress and throwing together templates and plugins for it. Theres still a bit of use of Laravel, but its paradoxically very much in the "burger flipper" category of least sought after and lowest paid jobs out there. Congrats for those graduating college with a coding qualification, you get to work on nonsense!

Honestly, I wish JS would go the same way. I hate working with the language, and web dev in general.

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[ls671]

Yeah, that's exactly what I came here to post, well, basically. More precisely, I was going to post that the only way I could see php was going down in popularity is that the same developers segment with propensity to use php would use node, js and the likes.

Not for me anyway, I prefer using a "real" programming languages for anything above really small quick and dirty applications instead of interpreted scripting languages and I find it pays off in the long term. For quick and dirty, I simply use bash scri

Re:

[Tablizer]

Gag, shoot 'em both!

That seems correct to me

[Going_Digital]

We have loads of PHP applications in use where I am that will need to remain in service for the forceable future, we have the developers on the team and that is what they know best. We would like to build new projects in something more modern like Go, but changing is hard. Some new small projects are done in Go, and we see PHP as something that we will gradually move away from, but these things don't happen overnight.

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[fahrbot-bot]

We have loads of PHP applications in use where I am that will need to remain in service for the forceable future, ...

Hopefully, you meant "foreseeable". :-)

Come on now

[jrnvk]

Whatever camp you're currently in is the camp you will be in for a while. Nothing new has come along recently, and AI will only keep the status quo. It's Java, PHP, .NET, or something else from here on out.

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[wyHunter]

Now this makes me wonder if computer science changes and research are a thing of the past with AI - just like care path based medicine done by "AI" (called that in the 90s when McKesson started doing such things) has led to a decline in patient care quality in medicine.

Big PHP got to them

[swillden]

n/t

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[Quakeulf]

You're thinking of PCP.

Re:

[wyHunter]

At least it isn't Big Perl.

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[swillden]

At least it isn't Big Perl.

No kidding. Those guys are scary.

Re: PHP remains stable, professional, and evolving

[devslash0]

100%

If you do not like reality, simply lie!

[gweihir]

This seems just another instance of that.