Its not just PHP, or even just software and digital infrastructure. Most average people would be appalled to get a look behind the curtain of how a great many things they depend on every day are operated once it is not sexy anymore and just fades into the background of the machinery that keeps the lights on and their lives going.
I always have this at the back of my mind
Many industries are this way, people don’t seem to realize it’s only in some cases two or three people in an entire region that are keeping some key peice of equipment going. Like shit even our infrastructure is that now, we used to have people on site everywhere monitoring but now so much is just a guy in an office doing the work of 50 people.
There’s a whole ass XKCD someone’s no doubt posted somewhere in this thread…
Why didn’t we have a meme with these wobbly piles of blocks representing the internet structure having one tiny pillar identified as PHP yet ?
Exactly, many thanks 👍 !
So a company with 1 developer has a director, interesting.
No one reads. Interesting.
Maybe the ‘director’ should be helping then?Oh, OK. That’s much better 😁
The director is the full time dev… Read the article.
Yk what isn’t understaffed? Other, better languages.
There might be “better” languages, but PHP is still used by ~70% of the web.
That number is a bit questionable:
- It only includes sites where the server-side language can be detected. That’s often easy with PHP because of URLs ending in
.phpand well-known software like Wordpress which identifies itself in ways that are easy for a crawler to detect. - It counts sites, not traffic. There are a lot of Wordpress sites out there which get three visitors a month.
and well-known software like Wordpress
Sorry, but you’re using the fact that PHP is used by the framework that makes up about 40% of the web on its own as an argument against the claim that PHP might be on as much as 70% of all websites? That’s before you start getting into other platforms like Drupal and MediaWiki, or more general-purpose frameworks like Laravel.
It only includes sites where the server-side language can be detected. That’s often easy with PHP because of URLs ending in
.phpand well-known software like Wordpress which identifies itself in ways that are easy for a crawler to detect.So there are possibly more PHP sites out there than we realize, because the ones which disguise their URLs are ambiguous
It counts sites, not traffic. There are a lot of Wordpress sites out there which get three visitors a month.
You shouldn’t be as concerned with popularity, and much more concerned with attack surface. Your argument certainly can’t be that there are thousands of idle servers out there that should no longer be maintained because no one reads the blog hosted on them?
Wordpress is still commonly used for e-commerce. You’re probably visiting more PHP sites than you realize.
- It only includes sites where the server-side language can be detected. That’s often easy with PHP because of URLs ending in
Is the director the only staff member? Does he want a raise?
“We have one full-time staff member (that’s me) and 14 mostly part-time contractors,” Executive Director Elizabeth Barron of the PHP Foundation said via email in an interview on Friday. Board members are unpaid volunteers, and funding comes from donations and grants.
Sounds more like she is stretched thin, and pointing out how unsustainable the current model is. Only one person dedicated to maintaining a programming language that ~70% of the internet uses is the perfect example of that xkcd “all modern infrastructure, vs one obscure person who has thanklessly been maintaining a project since 1997” meme.
70% of the internet? No. The web? Yes, maybe. These are not the same thing.
The usage of PHP in enterprise appliances is actually pretty wild - many firewalls, load balancers etc are using PHP for management plane activities. There is a lot out there outside of userland, and those are the appliances most vulnerable in my opinion. A compromised firewall is worse than a compromised website.
