PHP programming language – is it still popular?

Every day, thousands of new websites and applications are launched, and this tendency doesn’t seem to stop. However, have you ever wondered how these websites and apps are made? What language was used to build them? It turns out that most of the Internet is built on the PHP programming language. Many developers have kept saying that the language is almost dead but… let’s explain why PHP is still so popular, and why we love it so much at accesto.com.

A brief history of PHP programming language

PHP is one of the oldest programming languages in the world. It was created in 1994 and it was quite a revolution. Developers from all over the world have praised PHP for its ease of use. The language was developed by Rasmus Lerdorf, who created a bunch of scripts to track the visits to his online resume. He named the scripts as ‘Personal Home Page Tools’ which evolved into ‘PHP tools’ later on. Rasmus didn’t stop adding more tools to the suite and finally, he added functionality for database interactions and turned the suite into a more complete framework. In 1995, PHP became open source. As of now, the latest version of the language is 8.0.

What is PHP used for

PHP programming language is widely used in web development. It has been the primary component in some of the biggest platforms such as WordPress. Although many analysts have predicted PHP’s demise over the years, it is still one of the most popular programming languages and all rankings (e.g. RedMonk’s breakdown) confirm that. Approximately 80% of websites all over the Internet are built with PHP. These are Facebook, Yahoo, Wikipedia etc.

The most important advantages of PHP

PHP has been used so largely because:

1. It has been improving over the years and it has a large user base. The language has been getting better with each iteration.

2. WordPress (the most popular CMS solution in the world) is based on PHP. It means that most websites on the Internet are built on PHP.

3. PHP is flexible, scalable, and fully customizable.

4. The language is easy to learn, unlike many other programming languages that follow a steep learning curve. Experts say you can build a working dynamic web page with a database in a couple of days if only you had PHP and MySQL.

5. It’s open-source, free in all senses so the large community of developers has
worked with it. 

As you can see above, PHP is here to stay. It is widely used and even the ecosystem around it is actively evolving and improving, also because of a growing number of ready-to-use solutions and frameworks such as Symfony.