
Ask HN: Is ol good LAMP stack finally dead? - baybal2
I haven&#x27;t seen much job ads for PHP devs recently. Where did they all go? Did nodejs stack finally displaced PHP as the best way to do a quick and quirky backend?
======
nness
A good place to start is the Stackoverflow Developer Survey
([http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-
survey-2016](http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016)). The
2016 results show PHP as the 5th most popular technology (25.9%) compared to
Node.js (17.2%). PHP has dropped and Node.js risen by 5%~ since the 2015
results.

However, their "most dreaded" list has LAMP at 68.7%. Being that nearly three
quarters of all people using a LAMP stack do not want to be doing so.
Conversely, Node.js is loved, with 59.6% of respondents who develop with it
wanting to continue to develop with it.

Whilst PHP represents 3x the volume of Node.js topics, Node.js topics has
risen 26.8% since last year, and PHP dropping 3.8%. Import to note though is
that whilst PHP declined, WordPress also increased 18.5%. MySQL's results
still fairs better than SQL Server.

The survey results note:

> The average developer regularly uses between 4 and 5 major programming
> languages, frameworks and technologies. The most common 2-technology
> combination is JavaScript & SQL. The most common 3-tech combination is
> JavaScript, PHP, and SQL.

I would argue that PHP is completely alive and kicking but people aren't
interested in it as much. Given the age of PHP compared to Node.js, and the
way trends work, I think it is far early to crown a new LAMP king.

------
sebg
You can find YC companies that use PHP by going to
[https://triplebyte.com/ycombinator-
startups](https://triplebyte.com/ycombinator-startups) and looking at PhP for
technologies used. (linking is broken, so I can't send you the actual link).
That said, when I do it, 19 show up that are _currently_ hiring. Given that YC
companies are a very small amount of total possible tech companies hiring, I
would say that LAMP is not dead.

------
smt88
I actually think something better is happening: it's possible to write
backends in a lot more languages. Go, Swift, Rust, and Elixir come to mind as
becoming usable for web backends in the last 5 years or so. People just seem
to write their backend in the language they like the best.

Then you have BaaS and things like Postgraphql that mean that writing a
backend by hand is becoming a thing of the past. Lots of good developments,
but not necessarily a "new PHP" that's replacing PHP.

