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Comment by ijoyce | Hacker News Reader

PHP "runs half the Internet quite well"? Source?

Common sense. Calculate how much traffic Wikipedia + Facebook + Wordpress + All The Rest generate. Calculate in the fact that most services talk to other services and more importantly, talk to Facebook.

Click on a link?

I promise, at some point, PHP is involved.

When you actually have a real source or numbers, let me know.

Apparently it's closer to 78%

http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/pl-php/all/all

No matter how you try to hide from it, it's blatantly clear that PHP runs at least half the entire Web.

What else exactly did you think was? Surely you didn't think Python was running half the web. Obviously Ruby isn't. So what does that leave? Coldfusion? C?

> What else exactly did you think was?

Well, in principle, there's no reason any one language has to run half the web by itself. And there are also static pages.

You don't agree with the notion that many tech products like web languages (or browsers, operating systems / mobile platforms, or whatever) tend to trend heavily toward a single dominant product (either due to one simply being better, and or a benefit derived from scale of use such as plugins or knowledge availability etc etc)?

Sure, they tend to, but in principle they don't have to. I would want to assume that the GP assumes that one language runs over half the web.

Of course, once actual evidence is involved, this is just an adventure in nitpicking.

Not to mention that the web is not the internet.

Pretty sure almost everybody on HN understands the technical separation between the two.

Sometimes people speak in broad generalities, or use "Internet" when they mean "Web." It is in fact extraordinarily common.

> Sometimes people ... use "Internet" when they mean "Web." It is in fact extraordinarily common.

It's also wrong.

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