Is PHP Really Dead? Here’s the Truth

Most of us have heard the initialismPHP a lot in our life. PHP which was in fact short for personal home page and then later changed to Hypertext preprocessor. Since its creation in the 90s, PHP has faced a recurring question: is it dead? Every year a lot of people claim that php is dead but is it really dead or not?

Is PHP Dead? The Stats Tell a Different Story

According to statistics PHP is still not dead. Currently in the world there are nearly 2 billion websites and  more than 76 % of those websites still use php courtesy of wordpress.

According to the w3tech statistics there is a slight dip in usage of php  but is still far more used than any other language following a graph from w3techs regarding popularity of Php versions

This is  a table showing popularity of server side languages in past few years. 

Why Developers Still Love PHP: Modern Features and Strong Community

When you ask people about php you will find 2 kinds of people one which says “php is awesome and I love using it ”  and the other type of people you find are “php is so bad and has a lot of problem”,unfortunately the 2nd type of people are mostly those  which  have only used php  only once or have used php a long time ago. Php has made major improvements since php was introduced. Php 7 zend engine 3 was almost twice as fast as that of php 5.6 also in php 7 scaler declaration for function arguments was introduced i.e developers can now define what type the function argument expects.

 Simmerlly to php 7 php 8 also made some major improvements to php adding  modern features to this old programming language .

• In php 8 JIT (just in time ) compilation was introduced to further improve the the performance of php 
• Union Types : Allow variables to hold different types of values.
• Attributes: Provide a way to attach metadata to code elements.
• Constructor Property Promotion: Automatically promotes properties with default values to class properties.
• Null Safe Operator : Provides a safer way to access properties or call methods on potentially null objects.
• Weak Maps: Hold references to objects without preventing them from being garbage collected.
• Named Arguments : Allow function arguments to be passed in any order by name.
• Match Expression : Provides a concise alternative to switch statements.
• Stringable Interface : Simplifies working with string-like objects.
• Enums : Define a set of constant values.
• Readonly Properties : Declare properties that can only be assigned a value once.

• Saner String to Number Comparisons: Improves how PHP handles comparisons between strings and numbers.
• Consistent Type Errors for Internal Functions : Provides more informative type-related error messages.
• New Functions: Several new functions were introduced in PHP 8.x, including str_contains(), str_starts_with(), and str_ends_with() for string manipulation, and fdiv() for division

Php is a language having a huge community on platforms like stackoverflow and is a well maintained language getting updates over the years and the popularity of php is  thanks to frameworks like laravel,codeigniter and Symfony . one problem because of which people does not like php is the fact that people does not upgrade their webapplication/ websites to newer versions of php. As you have seen the above statistics  about 80% of websites made in php are still in php 7 where as even php 8.1 support has ended and it’s security support will end on 25th november 2024 according to php.net