I love how everyone always leaves PHP off these lists of "popular languages" despite the fact that 80% of the web runs on PHP.
I love how everyone always leaves PHP off these lists of "popular languages" despite the fact that 80% of the web runs on PHP.
I would however be curious to know what percentage of the 80% (or so) is WordPress et al. Since those largely don't involve folks actually writing code. I suspect a very small amount of PHP code is being run a lot.
A lot of my successful projects have been rewritten later in nodejs. But for getting something up and running to test a concept, PHP is great if you're comfortable with its idiosyncracies.
I'd say Python is just as idiosyncratic, and its packaging system is just too much of a pain point. And Node doesn't ship with mature database interfaces, its dependencies are scary, there's more concern about runaway scripts, crashes are harder to recover from, and a lot of times all you really want from a router is to serve your file structure with some access rules.
I think PHP is still the best choice for prototyping dynamic HTML and logic fast, without any packages or plug-ins. A lotta times I still even use it for short CLI scripts and cron tasks that do database ops.