> "nearly 80% of the internet is running on PHP as of 2018."<p>I've heard claims like this for years. They almost never explain their methodology for calculating market share among the entire web. The site linked actually shows its methodology and it proves that the author is using the statistic incorrectly.<p>Under methodolgies:<p>> <i>We investigate technologies of websites, not of
individual web pages. If we find a technology on any of the pages, it is considered to be used by the website.</i><p>This does not prove that 80% of the web is powered by PHP, but rather 80% of websites studied had PHP running in some capacity, under the same domain.<p>It would be wildly inaccurate to assess from that, that<p>> <i>"nearly 80% of the internet is running on PHP as of 2018."</i> as claimed.<p>Google.com may have a wordpress blog for press releases running somewhere under their domain... that hardly means google is powered by wordpress.<p>Also, for example it would be totally wrong to say Facebook is powered solely by PHP.
Also, and I say this as someone who has years of experience programming in multiple languages including PHP--It's a logical fallacy to say just because most people do something it is the correct course of action to take. This is a logical fallacy known as <i>argumentum ad antiquitatem</i> or an "appeal to common practice".<p>PHP is probably fine for many of the things the author mentioned particularly brochure, content-based, sites, blogs, portfolios etc... (although increasingly using static based sites hosted from s3
or other static host seems to make more sense, in terms of cost and performance.)<p>Then there is a whole host of other problem domains where PHP does not make sense as a technology choice, Data Science, Graphics, Comms/Messaging, Systems programming. Let's choose the right tool for the job.
What's the old adage about "when all you have is a hammer you treat every job as a nail."