During Google I/O 2013 event a Google manager said PHP runs on 75% of the Web sites. So they decided to finally support PHP as in their AppEngine hosting service.
Read this article to understand why this puts an end to years of false claims that PHP was losing market, as well what it means to Web developers using PHP or other languages.
.. 4. Programming Does Not Have to Be Beautiful
.. 5. PHP Detractors Have the Wrong Focus
PHP is not perfect but that does not matter. Actually those are not my words. Those are from Jeff Atwood of StackOverflow fame. Despite he knows that, it is not unusual to see him preaching against PHP. Well if it does not matter, why bother spending time and effort preaching against PHP?
Jeff is not alone. Haters will gonna hate, will do it in public spaces a lot, sometimes in disguised ways.
.. PHP May Not Be Dominant Forever
However, this may not be enough to make people exchange PHP for JavaScript. I think it is more likely that somebody develops asynchronous programming support in PHP.
Anyway, PHP is successful because the Web is popular, just like Windows is successful while the desktop computers are popular.
As more people move from the desktop computers to mobile devices, Windows may lose relevance. Likewise if people move from the Web to some other platform, PHP may no longer be as relevant as it is today.
Why hasn’t Facebook migrated away from PHP?
The flavor of PHP we use at Facebook, Hack, is very far removed from the what you typically think of when you picture PHP. In almost every way it has been ahead of JavaScript. We’ve had static typing, generators, async/await, tuples, anonymous functions, classes, and XHP (basically React) for a long time, often years before they were available in Node. As a result our Hack codebase is very close in spirit to a modern JS application.
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The reason that Facebook invested so heavily in Hack is that we have an absolutely massive codebase. We’ve favored a monolithic repro over loosely coupled services. Switching technologies would have been an all or nothing effort, and even more costly than adapting the language and incrementally adopting features over time.
.. Folks, Facebook users don’t give a crap about what’s behind the scenes. The real question is: does it work? If yes, why change it? Just because everybody is riding the Node.JS hype train? Are the users leaving FB because they don’t use Node?This type of questions reflect how broken developers mindset is. Focus on providing value to your business. If it solves the problem, nobody cares what technology stack you’re using…