Shlee messed around &I just committed 15 PRs (Bug fixes and improvements) to @loops and so can you!
Please join the 
development community!
Ada
Rusty Shackleford@rusty__shackleford @shlee @loops No offense, it's subjective. But I do not know many people which would enjoy working in #PHP; in fact it is usually a deal breaker for my peers to work on a project if it's in PHP.
An #alternative which devs I know like is either of #Kotlin/#JVM, #Python, or #Typescript/#Bun.
@ada
PHP runs ~75% of the web (+ Wiki & WordPress)
A language that needs a 50$/mo VPS & complex CI/CD pipeline is arguably less free than one running on a 3$ shared host
With that & the voting system in mind you could consider PHP one of the best for speech. Not the trendy choice, but the goal is accessibility/ deployment/ longevity, PHP’s ubiquity makes it the right tool for that job
Considering everything you said, it just sounds like "I don't like the syntax/ ecosystem & using it is a chore"
PHP runs ~75% of the web (+ Wiki & WordPress)
A language that needs a 50$/mo VPS & complex CI/CD pipeline is arguably less free than one running on a 3$ shared host
With that & the voting system in mind you could consider PHP one of the best for speech. Not the trendy choice, but the goal is accessibility/ deployment/ longevity, PHP’s ubiquity makes it the right tool for that job
Considering everything you said, it just sounds like "I don't like the syntax/ ecosystem & using it is a chore"
@rusty__shackleford sorry but this is 20 years old myth. A quarkus app needs around 100 mb of memory, which you can host practically for free. Developing it is way easier than with PHP. And where did you take the 75 % from? Also from the 90's? Wikipedia and WordPress are no longer synonyms for a web. 99 TLDs on WP aren't 99 % vs. google.com. The real stats would probably show Java, C#, Typescript, Python and Ruby as the real powers behind most of the content. But you do you, enjoy PHP 🙂
Did we forget Laravel, the most popular & most used framework right now?
Spotify? Slack? Mailchimp? Upwork? Trivago? Wordpress? Tumblr? Etsy?
Rely on PHP.
The 'PHP is dying' meme has been around over 15 years, but data shows a very slow transition.
Stats, 80% in 2017, 75% in 2025:
https://linuxblog.io/80-percent-web-powered-by-php/
https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/pl-php
Conversely, current estimated popularity/ sentiment is at 18%:
https://www.zenrows.com/blog/php-usage-statistics#widerl-used-server-side-language
Arguments like this show we're in a post irony 'php is dying' age.
@rusty__shackleford OK, here you go, hard data.
https://madnight.github.io/githut/#/pull_requests/2024/1
It is until 2024, but the trend is quite clear. Feel free to extrapolate.
@ada So W3Techs is chopped liver?
PR data is contextually misleading. PHP's PRs are complex, involve the core C engine & intense RFC processes. Due to this PHP sees ~1,600 prs/year
~21,000 since 2012
Meanwhile, Kotlin, due to their corporate model (jetbrains) sees ~1,000 prs/year
~6,000 since 2016
Laravel (php framework), over 83K stars & 24K forks, trails right behind node & django in real world application. Due to the way they operate, Laravel sees ~4,800 prs/year
~60,000 since 2011
🍎 & 🍊
@rusty__shackleford I'm not sure what you're trying to say.
Surely, any stats can be explained in various ways. Just like Trump will lower the prices of medicine by 1600 %, I'm pretty sure 90 % of web runs on PHP.
You avoided the question:
***So W3Techs is chopped liver?***
Avoidance aside, you're not sure what I'm trying to say? I'm being blunt:
You're miscontextualizing statistical data
When called out, you feign ignorance & use a straw man argument in the effort to claim I'm the one miscontextualizing data using trump as the example
Either way, in order, with popularity, usage, & pr's taken into consideration, we're actually looking at django, laravel (php), & nestjs:
https://statisticsanddata.org/data/most-popular-backend-frameworks-2012-2025/
