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Comment by jimparkins | Hacker News Reader

"That 80% marketshare is not going anywhere anytime soon."

>> I have seen this mentioned many times before, and also worked in PHP development teams. However I think this statement is confusing. There is no way that php development or programming is 80% of the market. I suspect that when you crawl round the internet a lot of spam blogs and advertising content is based off of php based CMS like Wordpress and Drupal - because it is so easy to get a generic template driven website up and running with a good SEO basis. I can believe 80% of the websites that return content could be PHP based.

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This is maybe the third comment about whether the 80% is lies, damned lies, or statistics.

I would much rather see a conversation about how other languages can bridge the gaps of "hello world in a browser isn't obvious" and "deployment is hard". Those are important and useful things to do, regardless of PHP's market share.

I thought Ruby has all but bridged it?

With what? Rails? Doesn't that require generating a whole "project" (whatever that is) with a bunch of directories and files and then figuring out where everything is and...

PHP requires opening index.php and typing "hello world". Obviously that's not going to work anywhere else, but something like Flask (or Sinatra) is much closer.

Deployment, maybe. The biggest stumbling block is that no matter how magical a deployment solution anyone invents, it's worthless unless there are free/cheap hosts that come with it installed and have cPanel integration.

Meteor?

This seems to be the authoritative source for that number: http://w3techs.com/

and the methodology:

http://w3techs.com/technologies

"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. We include only the top 10 million websites (top 1 million before June 2013) in the statistics in order to limit the impact of domain spammers. We use website popularity rankings provided by Alexa (an Amazon.com company) using a 3 months average ranking. Alexa rankings are sometimes considered inaccurate for measuring website traffic, but we find that they serve our purpose of providing a representative sample of established sites very well."

I would argue that the numbers should be weighted by traffic - weighting all of the top ten million websites equally doesn't give an accurate picture.

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