[zmw]

This dubious 78% statistic has been discussed to death in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28510520.

The submitted title is badly editorialized and leaves out the actual point of the article: only "1% on PHP 8" despite a whopping 78% total, if we take the dubious statistic at face value.

For the record, the submitted title is "78% of the Web Powered by PHP" at the time of this comment.

[reilly3000]

If you look at the web by urls not weighted by traffic, you’ll come across the unfathomably large swath of autogenerated spam blogs. For every legitimate business in the world there are 100 people trying to ‘make money online’ paying for scripts that register and post spun content on thousands of domains. The long tail of the internet is an absolute wasteland. It’s tech choices should have little bearing on the rest of us.

[TrispusAttucks]

To be fair [1] 8.0 is less than a year old.

It's also a bit unwise to jump right into a point zero release when you could wait for point one release with more of the bugs ironed out.

8.1 just hit RC4 [2] five days ago. I'd say after the final RC is approved we will start to see an increase in PHP 8 usage. Even more so after Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release.

[1] https://www.php.net/archive/2020.php#2020-11-26-3

[2] https://www.php.net/archive/2021.php#2021-10-14-1

[nonameiguess]

Yes, thank you. The site's methodology disclaimer explains this is the percentage of sites for which they could automatically determine the language in use on the server. Newer web languages don't include a header telling you the language and version in use at all, and if web frameworks add one, security auditors will always make you remove it.

So the real statistic is 78% of websites that are written in a dynamic scripting language, don't get pen-tested, or don't care about security, are written in PHP. That's a very different statistic than 78% of all servers that will respond to an HTTP request.

[ashitlerferad]

So 78% by PHP but 77% below PHP version 8. OK