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The Future of PHP
Is it a dead programming language?
PHP has had better days, for sure. But is it really dead?
On a forums like Stack Overflow people are suggesting that PHP is dead. Do they have a valid point, or could it be that they just don’t like PHP?
Let’s take a look at PHP and see if there is a future for this programming language.
PHP is Still Dominating the Web
If you take a simple look at the numbers PHP is definitely not dead. PHP is the most used server-side programming language by far. Approximately 75 percent of all webpages are powered by PHP. Take a look at the graph below and see how far PHP is ahead of its competition in terms of how often it’s used. It is fair to conclude that PHP isn’t dead based on this statistic since 75 percent is far too high number for a dead language!
One of the reasons that PHP is used by so many websites is because WordPress uses PHP. The market share of WordPress is approximately 34 percent of all websites. That’s 75 million websites using WordPress.
Furthermore, there are some other CMS’s like Drupal (3%) and Joomla(2%) which also have a significant share of the market. And there are some popular shop management systems, like Magento, which have around 1 percent of the total market share.
A lot of big content and shop management systems are using PHP, which makes PHP important and relevant.
Building Websites From Scratch
I can see the argument about building websites from scratch since a lot of people, who use WordPress for example, don’t know how to code. Making a website in WordPress does not require you to know how to code. A lot of people who have a WordPress website probably don’t even know that it’s powered by PHP. So is PHP still used by people who build websites from scratch?
PHP was and still is a very popular language. One of the reasons for this is that it’s a really easy programming language to learn. That makes it an excellent language for people new to building…
