According to the latest statements by WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, the popularity of PHP is rapidly declining, one possible reason being WordPress’s priority promotion of JavaScript. The latest update to the TIOBE programming language popularity index has sparked deep discussions in the industry about the fate of PHP, raising a critical question: “Is the magic of PHP fading?”
According to the latest TIOBE rankings, PHP fell to 17th place in April this year, a new low for the language since statistics have been kept. Over the past few years, signs of PHP’s declining popularity have been apparent in several statistics. According to the annual Stack Overflow developer survey report, its market share has slipped from 30.7% in 2018 to just 18.58% in 2023. This trend is further confirmed by JetBrains’ developer ecosystem survey, which indicates the usage of PHP has dropped from 30% in 2017 to 18% now.
This downward trend is clearly visible in the website statistics from BuiltWith. Beginning from the end of 2020, PHP’s growth curve has shown a steep decline. According to the latest data, PHP’s usage among the internet’s top one million most popular websites has dropped from over 30,000 to approximately 15,000, a testament to the rapid pace of its decline. Another confirming piece of statistical data comes from BuiltWith Quotes, which indicates PHP’s current actual market share is 18.19%.
From the above data, it’s evident that in a short span of just two years, the popularity of PHP among developers has declined by a substantial 40%. So, what exactly is causing PHP to lose its advantage so quickly in the competition among web programming languages?
The answer may be attributed to WordPress, which is by far the most popular web content management system, and is gradually transitioning from PHP to JavaScript. Matt Mullenweg, during the recently held WordCamp Asia 2024 conference in Taiwan, explicitly expressed WordPress’s strategic shift.
In a recent interaction with the audience, an industry leader made an insightful remark, pointing out that new code added to the WordPress platform is increasingly written in JavaScript, showing a significant trend: WordPress is gradually becoming a project that predominantly uses JavaScript. This speaker was none other than WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, who cited Gutenberg as a major update for the platform, which also underscores the broad background of JavaScript gradually replacing PHP.
However, this does not mean that WordPress will completely abandon PHP. In fact, the WordPress interface used for writing articles is still accomplished through PHP interfaces such as “/wp-admin/post-new.php”. Therefore, although PHP remains core at present, WordPress is moving towards a new path of development in the future.
In his vision for the future of WordPress, Mullenweg revealed his foresight into technological transformation. He hopes that WordPress will be able to execute more client-side operations through JavaScript, thereby further releasing server-side resources. He believes that with the widespread adoption of virtual machines and high-performance processors, the efficiency of running JavaScript on the browser side will greatly improve.
Mullenweg also suggested that with the advancement of the Gutenberg project, developers will not only need to adapt to this new JavaScript-first trend but will also have to relearn new ways of development, even if these may differ from their past experiences. He noted that although there might be some simplifications in the current abstraction level, overall, there will be a tendency to delve deeper into exploring this developmental trajectory.
Gutenberg project, which includes the shift towards the JavaScript language, is not yet complete. The team responsible for the project realizes that it might be a project lasting up to 10 years. According to the latest progress, we have currently completed about 60% to 70% of the workload.
Meanwhile, the PHP Foundation is also steadily progressing. It cannot be overlooked that the WordPress project—the key driver for the continued popularity of PHP in the web domain—is decisively moving towards the JavaScript realm. This change will undoubtedly reduce the selection of PHP by younger developers while also encouraging others, such as developer teams serving WordPress clients, to migrate from PHP to JavaScript. Fortunately, a large number of developers still choose to use PHP. According to a recent large-scale developer survey, about 18% of professionals remain loyal to PHP.
The PHP Foundation, a non-profit organization that was officially established in November 2021, is committed to taking on the management responsibilities of the PHP project. The foundation was established by an alliance of corporations led by JetBrains, with members including Automattic, Zend, Laravel, and Acquia (the hosting company for Drupal), among others. JetBrains engineer Roman Pronskiy serves as the operation director of the project. In February, at the Laravel conference, Pronskiy primarily discussed technical issues and admitted that transforming PHP’s public image is one of the biggest challenges facing the foundation.
Unfortunately, based on Matt Mullenweg‘s explanation of WordPress’s “JavaScript first” strategy, it can be inferred that these transformations have, to some extent, contributed to the tarnishing of PHP’s public image. Despite the situation, Pronskiy is actively involved in the ongoing development of the PHP project and has organized a team consisting of 10 full-time developers.
Generally speaking, by 2024, PHP seems to be underappreciated in the field of web development, whereas JavaScript is receiving significant attention in all respects. More regrettably, due to the WordPress development team being busy adapting to new JavaScript specifications, the decline in PHP’s popularity may not stop anytime soon. But at least the PHP Foundation is still working hard to change this situation, hoping that the downturn can gradually turn around.
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