On Sun, Sep 15, 2019 at 8:14 AM Zeev Suraski <z...@php.net> wrote: > On Sun, Sep 15, 2019 at 1:15 PM Olumide Samson <oludons...@gmail.com> > wrote: > > > I also don't agree with the index and all its statistics > > > > I'm not sure what you mean by 'all its statistics'. Mostly everything on > the methodology page is fluff, which may be purposely there to hide the > only part that really matters: > ---------------- > > The ratings are calculated by counting hits of the most popular search > engines. The search query that is used is > > +"<language> programming" > > --------------- > > It's a simplistic measure of an arbitrary search term in search engines - > nothing more. It's completely, 100.0% meaningless. > > > > , yet I'm not invalidating it as it is a much-viewed index globally. > > > > I am. It's quite remarkable that people are paying any level of attention > to it whatsoever, and indeed it's saddening. But the fact that many people > believe something doesn't make it true, if the evidence clearly suggest it > isn't. > > According to the index : > > "Till the end of 2009 everything went fine, but soon after that PHP was > > going downhill from 10% to 5% market share in 2 years’ time. In 2014 it > > halved again to 2.5%. > > > > Trying to correlate the TIOBE index with anything that happened in the PHP > world is akin to trying to correlate the results of rand() with the weather > forecast. The two aren't related at all. Building any thesis on the > foundation of the TIOBE index is like trying to build a brick house on a > muddy soil. Heck, like trying to build a brick house in the middle of the > ocean. There's nothing to build on. > > While it's extremely difficult to measure the popularity of languages, > RedMonk's slightly more relevant measurements (GitHub projects and Stack > Overflow questions) suggest it's been doing well over the last decade - > right up there in the top 5 with no meaningful decline. What Mike and > others pointed out are areas where we should consider investing if we want > to *increase* the popularity beyond what it already is (which is what > happened with Python). > > Zeev >
While I think some excellent suggestions have been made on this thread, one thing that I feel Mike's sources show (and maybe it's confirmation bias) is that any decline in popularity that PHP might be experiencing (for the sake of argument, we'll pretend such a decline does exist) isn't because PHP isn't strict enough. It's because it doesn't do a lot of the things that languages like Python can do. If this is the case, we don't reverse the trend by making our language more syntactically or behaviorally like the other languages out there. We reverse it by supporting the features that are currently lacking, or, adding features that other languages don't have. -- Chase Peeler chasepee...@gmail.com
