Is PHP Declining In Popularity?

The PHP programming language has sunk to its lowest position ever on the long-running TIOBE index of programming language popularity. It now ranks #17 — lower than Assembly Language, Ruby, Swift, Scratch, and MATLAB. InfoWorld reports:

When the Tiobe index started in 2001, PHP was about to become the standard language for building websites, said Paul Jansen, CEO of software quality services vendor Tiobe. PHP even reached the top 3 spot in the index, ranking third several times between 2006 and 2010. But as competing web development frameworks such as Ruby on Rails, Django, and React arrived in other languages, PHP's popularity waned.

'The major driving languages behind these new frameworks were Ruby, Python, and most notably JavaScript,' Jansen noted in his statement accompanying the index. 'On top of this competition, some security issues were found in PHP. As a result, PHP had to reinvent itself.' Nowadays, PHP still has a strong presence in small and medium websites and is the language leveraged in the WordPress web content management system. 'PHP is certainly not gone, but its glory days seem to be over,' Jansen said.

A note on the rival Pypl Popularity of Programming Language Index argues that the TIOBE Index 'is a lagging indicator. It counts the number of web pages with the language name.' So while 'Objective-C' ranks #30 on TIOBE's index (one rank above Classic Visual Basic), 'who is reading those Objective-C web pages? Hardly anyone, according to Google Trends data.' On TIOBE's index, Fortran now ranks #10.

Meanwhile, PHP ranks #7 on Pypl (based on the frequency of searches for language tutorials).

TIOBE's top ten?

Python
C
C++
Java
C#
JavaScript
Go
Visual Basic
SQL
Fortran

The next two languages, ranked #11 and #12, are Delphi/Object Pascal and Assembly Language.

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