Is really PHP a declined programming language?
Thousands of different programming languages have been created and more are in the process of being. PHP, released in 1995 is a general purpose scripting language particularly suited to web development.
PHP, which is a server side scripting language today and is used for web development, in the earliest of its days was a term used to refer “Personal Home Page”. Since its introduction in 1995, to its present day avatar, a lot has changed except the fact that it has always been one of the most widely used web development languages across the globe. In the present day, we know PHP as “Hypertext Preprocessor” and a general purpose scripting language which can either be embedded into HTML or can be leveraged for web development.
PHP is used for including web content management systems MediaWiki, WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Moodle etc…
Websites using PHP include Facebook, Digg, Dailymotion, and Tumblr.
As of January 2013, PHP was used in more than 240 million websites (39% of those sampled) and was installed on 2.1 million web servers.
As of August 2019, PHP was used as the server-side programming language on 78.8% of websites, down from 83.5% previously, where the language could be determined.
As of April 2020, PHP 7 is the most used version of the language with 50.6% of sites using PHP and 39.6% of all websites on the web.
Next-gen technologies led the devs to orient themselves towards Artificial Intelligence including Machine Learning and Deep Learning. By the way PHP is less used right now even for the web while frameworks like Django, Flask or Rails are taking the lead.
Bottom line, PHP has shown some limitations to be adapted to the challenges of new technologies. However, this is still important for key tools like WordPress, which is widely used for building websites quickly. As long as PHP frameworks like Symfony or Laravel give advantages to developers, PHP will always have a place among the most popular languages although some people don’t like the syntax.
