I think this varies wildly depending on where you live. Where I live (Melbourne), just the cost of suitable housing (a/ near a school, b/ close to most jobs, and c/ with space for 1+ children) is so high that it makes it difficult for a lot of couples to even consider children.
But it wasn't cheap "back then" either. I've spent 1 hour one way riding 2 buses to school (same as my parents to work). We had 62 m^2 (670 sq. ft.) of house for 2 parents + 3 children.
It's just now we suddenly consider that too bad. Back then it was normal, just like everyone else.
I don’t know where you were born and how old you are, but that situation was defiantly not usual when i was a child (born 1983 in Israel). If anything I think I’d need a startup-liquidity-event level windfall to be able to afford housing as spacious as my parents bought in the 80s (housing costs increased way more than wages).
It may have been when my parents were born though (mid 1940s, one in what is now Israel and the other in what was then the Soviet Union).
But your parents didn't live in Israel 2019. Israel 1983 was more like today's Venezuela or Argentina. If you move today to a place comparable to Israel in 1983, you'll be able to afford even more space than your parents.
Not sure why 2019 specifically, it's 2024. I think you also underestimate 1980s Israel - although there was a stock-market crash in 1983, it was not otherwise that poor- maybe more like today's Portugal or Greece than Venezuela.
But anyway my parents were 1983 Israelis, they didn't come with future-Israel purchasing power - so they were able to afford their housing on the income of the time :) Other kids in my class had ± similar housing. Some were poor and had worse housing, but not 5 people in a 62m flat level of poverty- for that to be common you had to go back another couple decades (e.g. my mother's childhood experience in the 40s-50s was more like that, might have been common up to the 60s).
I never had my own room. Up until age of 14 I slept on bunk bed sharing a room with my brother and my parents, so it doesn't always mean a separate room.
Eurostat [0] would have you believe that you want 3 rooms for a family of 2 adults and 1 child. That's fine as an aspirational goal, but I feel that parents with a toddler living in a signle-room flat is good enough, especially for the baby.
> If she gets the most joy from Rust, that's what she should use!
In the past I’d try to justify why I’d done something a certain way when another way would’ve been faster / better / cheaper, but I now realise that (at least for personal pursuits) an acceptable answer to “why?” is simply “because I wanted to”.
I feel like this is where I've personally landed with Rust. For many applications, it's at least good enough. It gets the job done. It looks and feels professional. Fit and finish are rarely a material concern. It rarely causes active problems (except where there isn't native coverage yet) and reduces or eliminated many more. And... well, I like it.
If I were putting together a web development team, would I recommend Rust? ...probably not. But that's because I'm putting together a team, not a playground. I'm paying people. I want to use common, well-supported, time-tested methods, unless steering away from that is truly needed to make the project successful. For web dev, that assuredly ain't Rust ("yet," some may add).
But for me? Just for me? I think it's a language I'll always enjoy. Within that line of thinking, I do feel there's room for better web dev tooling in Rust, though what's already there is probably enough to at least get started.
> He says he is “not bad” at maths – by which he means he came top in the state of New South Wales in his year 12 maths exams
As an Australian that has worked with American companies for a while, this is a behaviour I’ve had to overcome. If you tell an Australian you’re “not bad” at something then they’ll take that to mean that you’re actually quite good, whereas many Americans will understand it to mean that you’re not good.
I'm sure you're aware, but thought I'd drop this for our American friends. Australia and New Zealand (where I'm from) share Tall poppy syndrome[1] and going by that Wikipedia page, there are various over countries that have a similar concept.
Being overly self-congratulatory comes across as this sort of grotesque and unattractive quality. It is even true in the corporate environments I've worked at where you would normally otherwise expect it. Kiwis don't like it and I've seen many foreigners, especially the few Americans that have come over into management roles completely flounder and have almost everyone hate them because of it.
As an American who's spent two years in Sydney and having met VC types here, it's like they toe the line of not wanting to boast but really speak down on a lot of people. There's some sort of hidden aristocracy here, and you can feel like they think they're way better than you.
You get some of that in the US too but there are also way more down-to-earth people there who actually want to help, and advice is actually helpful, rather than regurgitations of PG essays and Lean Startup.
I have never been to Sydney, but I do know that Sydney (at least its wealthier population) is perceived as elitist and shallow by other parts of Australia. It has a reputation a lot like L.A. has in the US.
Melbourne, on the other hand, is seen as Australia's Portland.
This was my experience as a dual citizen. Sydneysiders are sometimes wannabe Londoners with an odd superiority complex and frequent use of passive aggression.
In Canada being modest is quite important… unless it’s a job interview (whether explicit or implicit), in which case it’s the “one time you should really brag about what you’re good at.”
Does it always mean that in Australia, or does it depend on how you say it? I think both usages are actually pretty common in the US, but you tell the difference based on the inflection. If you emphasize "too" and go down in pitch on "bad" then it means you're actually not that good at something, if you emphasize "bad" and go up in pitch then it means you're actually good at it. We also have alternative constructions, like "not too shabby," which carry the positive connotation regardless of how they're pronounced.
I'm an American who has lived in Australia for a little over a decade, and I have not noticed a difference between Australians and Americans in this regard. If you aren't too familiar with one accent or the other, it may be a little difficult to pick up on whether someone is emphasizing or deemphasizing "too" or "bad", but the essential meaning of the emphasis is the same.
In general, I find Americans and Australians deemphasize positive things at about the same rate and in the same circumstances, though the exact phrasing used can differ (although "not too bad" is a case where the phrase is shared in both dialects).
However, Australians are more likely to also deemphasize negative things (e.g., "This weather is average" to mean it's bad) whereas Americans are more likely to use sarcasm for negative things (e.g., "This weather is great" to mean it's bad).
> whereas many Americans will understand it to mean that you’re not good
I haven't found that to be true. Tooting your own horn is generally looked upon as impolite in many circles. It's pretty common for someone who is outstanding at something to say "yeah, not bad".
And in a very meta way, it can be seen as a flex. Someone who is undeniably the best at something can say "yeah, I'm not bad" with a smirk to show that yeah, they know they are very good.
Now there are some circles in the US where bragging is common - banking, VC, hell even tech. But that's not America.
In traditional Australia Tea meaning Tea the drink .. vast quantities have been consumed here, at least until the rise of the coffee shop - but the main thing is water is mostly boiled before drinking - flavour added.
It was once universal custom in Australia to offer either tea or a beer when someone arrived - rehydration in a hot country is a thing to do.
"Have you finished that drink yet" - depending on inflection it's either an offer of another or a strong cue to hit the road.
Offshoring has been around for decades, and if it produced the desired results at the desired price then employers would replace every expensive employee with a cheaper one (where possible). As it stands, offshoring is commonly used by large body shops, and a non-zero amount of work is done offshore, yet the cost for tech talent has increased (at least on average, the last year or two has seen somewhat of a correction).
There are definitely highly talented individuals in low cost areas, but they quickly realise they can earn a Big Tech wage, and are willing to relocate (often relocation is a bonus; as much as we complain sometimes, quality of life in a HCOL area is comparably quite nice compared to many LCOL areas).
The threat of hiring a bunch of cheap offshore labour is a bogeyman; companies would already have done this if it were feasible.
I'm not even talking about offshoring, the difference in cost of living even within the US can be massive, especially if you take off the commute and associated expenses. Quality of life is subjective of course, but in many respects is inversely correlated with the availability of high-paying jobs.
> There are definitely highly talented individuals in low cost areas, but they quickly realise they can earn a Big Tech wage, and are willing to relocate
I have a theory that someone found a bunch of cheap generic toys (vehicles, dogs, etc) and realised they could sell a lot of them if they slapped a logo on the side and made a cheap, below average cartoon that showed them to kids.
I’m almost certain that there are other examples of this too.
This is exactly what Transformers were in the 1980s: pre-existing Japanese toys whose existence had nothing to do with the retconned “Autobots vs. Decepticons” cartoon plot. That was invented to drive the toys into the American market.
> PAW Patrol is a Canadian computer-animated children's television series created by Keith Chapman and produced by Spin Master Entertainment, with animation provided by Guru Studio
> Spin Master Corp. is a Canadian multinational children's toy and entertainment company
Sorry, but in this case they are designed in concert: shitty toys and a cartoon to advert^W sell these shitty toys.
> PHP is used by 77% of all the websites whose server-side programming language we know.
I had a quick look at the methodology section, but it’s not clear to me how accurate this data is. Determining whether a site uses PHP can be relatively straightforward (especially with default extensions / if Wordpress is used / etc), but if a site (potentially using a different language) is behind a reverse proxy/uses an API/etc then it is less clear. Does anyone know whether PHP is over-represented in the results because it’s easy to identify?
No doubt PHP is still huge, but 77% seems almost too huge. There is also a very good chance that PHP is actually that big and I’m just in a different crowd.
Saying 77% of the web is run by PHP and concluding therefore that PHP is well-liked for websites is like telling most of banking is run in COBOL and therefore COBOL is well-liked for banking.
The conclusion has no coherence to the source.
I guess that most of the web runs on PHP (because it runs on Wordpress) if counted by page-view. But I'm not sure that's the proper measure.
In default configuration PHP identifies itself in response headers, but you can turn that off. People who know how to set up and administer web back ends generally do that from a security best practice checklist. So if anything PHP runs more sites than the number discovered crawling the web looking for identifying evidence.
Wordpress and similar CMSs, e-commerce platforms, and the Laravel framework give themselves away in other ways that take more work to hide. Likewise non-PHP back-ends have easy to see fingerprints in the headers and page source. There’s no reason to think PHP appears to dominate because crawlers can easily identify PHP but can’t identify other back-ends.
Banks and large companies with large COBOL code bases mainly maintain their legacy code, they don’t write a lot of new code in COBOL or RPG. And you won’t find COBOL powering web sites, which makes the argument irrelevant to the topic. The last time I worked on a big legacy back-end I was putting a web front end on it, using PHP and ColdFusion.
I agree. I always doubted these figures (I'm a PHP dev myself, so I wouldn't mind these figures being true).
I think the methodology is shady. I wonder if they use what the server indicates. I think some servers like Apache with php mod send this information to the client in a header. But most servers don't. Therefore they maybe use this as "from all the servers giving a backend language information, PHP represents 77%" which wouldn't be surprising. The question is how many websites in your data don't give any information about the language used under the hood?
I think we should stop using these numbers. GitHub uses ruby on rails but we know it from the developer team, not from what the server tells us. How many websites communicate about their backend infrastructure?
I don't doubt Wordpress powers many websites out there. But I'm tired of these figures which don't mean anything to me. Especially that if you look for all job ads, PHP isn't so big (except in some PHP-centric countries like France).
You can't just make up numbers. If you give me statistics, give me the methodology you used and all the details. Otherwise I suggest we all start saying Haskell powers 87% of the web. After all, if you can invent what suits you, I can do the same.
Identifying the technologies behind a web site involves a lot more than looking at Apache's mod_php headers (which you can and should turn off for security reasons). The tools for figuring out what runs a site actually do a really good job by looking for multiple identifying features. Marketers and SEO people use tools like BuiltWith and Wappalyzer (and many others, most of them not free). You may not know about those tools or how well they work, but a quick browse of that space will disabuse you of the idea that these surveys just crawl looking at server headers.
Multiple independent surveys of web back-end technologies by different outlets, across many years, have reached the same conclusion: PHP powers approximately 3/4ths of public web sites/applications. I do a lot of PHP work and I see PHP used heavily in restricted/private web applications as well -- internal sites that won't show in these kinds of surveys. One school I work for has one public WordPress-powered site and several internal-only WordPress sites, and multiple internal PHP-powered sites not based on WordPress, including Moodle (learning management system) and their student management system.
The large ecosystem, relatively large population of experienced developers, and ease of deployment play into the decision process. Sometimes it comes down to hosting costs or other non-technical factors.
Deducing the number of jobs for PHP developers based on job ads will mislead you. Most jobs get filled internally, informally, or by recruiters before they get posted online (because that costs). If you don't see a lot of ads for PHP developers that might mean few jobs exists (which wouldn't match the experience of anyone who works with PHP). It may also mean the jobs got filled before the employer has to pay to advertise the job. A position for a 5+ yrs experience Elixir dev may sit open for months, but I can and have filled PHP dev openings in a few days, from a large list of applicants acquired by a free posting in a local PHP user's group forum, without having to post in public job forums or do LinkedIn email blasts.
We should also consider that web developers with more than a few years of experience have likely worked with multiple tech stacks, and those of us with 10+ years very likely cut our teeth on PHP. I started in the '90s with ASP and ColdFusion, with some Perl, and then saw employers move to PHP (and a few to Rails a few years later) mainly because ASP (which predates .NET) and ColdFusion required increasingly expensive licenses whereas PHP did not. Among experienced web developers you will find many/most of them have worked with PHP, and could work with it again, though they may prefer something else. Likewise I know COBOL and could fall back on that if more interesting work dried up for me, but I don't call myself a COBOL developer or look for jobs in that space.
Thank you for your comment. I was definitely wrong about the different methods used.
This is why I love Hacker News. Always nice to learn something.
I still think the stats they provide are a bit weird since there is no "unknown" category. If they can't find the backend technology used for 5% of websites, it changes the whole result, and from what I have seen they don't provide this information.
But your really nice and detailed answer tells me I might be wrong once more.
I don’t see an “unknown” category. A large number of unknowns could skew the results if we had reason to believe those mostly represent non-PHP sites. Do we have any reason to think those unknown sites show a different distribution than the known sites? Do enough unknown sites exist to meaningfully affect the results?
Using your 5% example, supposing that 5% unknown includes no PHP sites, that only brings the PHP percentage down a little. It doesn’t change the main point that PHP dominates by a wide margin.
Some technologies seem to give more tells than others. Which means some technologies could be way more invisible than others. I am not sure we can suppose the known and unknown technologies have the same ratio.
I quickly checked some websites with BuiltWith and Wappalyzer and from my personal totally unscientific and small sample data, they seem to detect more easily PHP than other languages like Python.
Again, I don't know. But I took 5% to be optimistic. It could be 30% or 50%. And then the whole picture changes.
Edit: Funny thing, it even adds PHP to some sites I know (almost for sure) don't use PHP. Like GitHub using Ruby (true) and PHP with Drupal (???).
PHP probably gets used in low-price shared hosting setups or managed hosting more than other languages, where those tells will show up because the developer can't change the Apache or PHP configuration files. And of course the big PHP numbers come from WordPress, which has its own tells. Developers don't necessarily choose WordPress -- the customer chooses it or starts with it and that's what developers have to work with.
More interesting to me than the actual breakdown by language is the reaction from developers when this article or something like it gets published. I look at PHP and every other language I've had to learn and use in my career (a lot of them, I started 40 years ago) as tools to get a job done. I don't get personally invested in languages or tools. I don't identify as a "PHP developer" or "Go developer" or "Javascript developer." I write code and manage systems to make money. What language or tools I decide to use (or more often have to use because someone got to decide already) makes little difference. PHP got popular because it was free (as opposed to ASP and ColdFusion, which were not) and was less inscrutable than Perl. As a long-time C programmer with experience on ASP, ColdFusion, and Perl I had no trouble learning PHP. I likewise had no trouble learning Ruby and Rails, Python, Javascript, and Go. All of those will eventually fade into the world of legacy tools, along with everything else I've learned and used. I don't care, I don't have any part of my personality or ego invested in them. I don't get how other developers get so invested, call themselves "Rust programmers" or whatever and then get hostile and defensive. I guess that's human nature -- I see Tesla owners identifying with their car brand, and I remember the cult around the Saturn cars. I interpret a lot of the apparent insecurity and hostility as inexperience, but it seems to go beyond that into a kind of programmer identity politics.
If PHP dominates public web sites, so what? That has no effect on what tools I choose to learn or use, or how I value my skills, or much of anything that I might care about. I read all the time about how many people use Python, how many jobs are out there for Python programmers, and that makes no difference to me. If I get a client using Python all I care about is solving their business problems and getting paid for my expertise, not what language I have to use.
I agree. I don't think this way either. And I wouldn't be bothered with someone telling me X or Y has the main marketshare on the web.
I just don't like when figures are thrown at me and the methodology is questionable. Would be the case for any topic.
> I don't get how other developers get so invested
That's because your investment is means-to-an-end. For others, such as DHH for example, their chosen language is a means of expression and consequently they have a very strong personal investment. The Ruby and Clojure communities, for example, largely consist of developers who have a very strong personal attachment to the language and that's understandable since these languages are much more expressive whereas a language like Java will tend to attract developers who see it merely as a tool and maybe use it because it is a market leader. Languages like Ruby and Clojure demand a broadening of the mind so tend to attract users who are looking for more in a language than the standard fare of Algol-based features.
People have already questioned the validity of this number. Do a search and you'll find people looking into this and conclude that the number is very unreliable. Whether you agree or not is up to you.
Also I want to point out that almost any time people quote number about PHP's popularity, this is the only number, which is strange -- for metrics like iOS market share you can always find multiple numbers from multiple sources which don't fully agree with each other but are within a certain range. Not for this PHP number. In other words, w3tech's number is not cross validated by any other source. I wouldn't use it to "prove" anything.
"People" questioning the numbers published by multiple outlets over at least a decade? Who? What data do they have to "conclude that the number is very unreliable?"
Whether PHP runs 77% or 69% of public web sites, how does that offend anyone or make them feel insecure? No one is trying to "prove" anything, there's no race to the one ultimate tech stack that requires winners and losers. You can accept the fact that PHP objectively runs a large majority of public web sites without interpreting that as a threat to your choices, your job, your image of yourself as a professional.
Having so much PHP out there may look like a problem, but programmers attaching their ego and identity to languages and tools and frameworks accounts for a lot more wasted time and crappy code than a popular language that has some obvious and well-known flaws.
Idle musing, but this is likely correct. If someone who isn't tech-minded is throwing together a quick blog in WordPress or something chances are they aren't going the extra mile to change the headers or add a reverse proxy just to obfuscate that they're using a stock WordPress install.
I run a couple of services that are accesible through an API built in Symfony (PHP), but the data is generated with software built with JS (event driven -> lambda, cloudflare workers), Python (depending on GDAL mostly) and also PHP.
It sounds like you're ultimately just saying that the 77% number doesn't feel right to you.
I agree that it's an interesting challenge to try to determine which language a large number of sites are using for the backend, or at least it would be a challenge in some small but maybe not insignificant percentage of cases. And no doubt whichever way they solved it involved compromises.
But that by itself doesn't give us enough information to draw conclusions about accuracy.
WordPress is one of the few CMSs that sends a header saying it's running WordPress and otherwise makes it very obvious. PHP is so high on the known list because every other back-end you can't tell what it is.
Not true. Identifying a tech stack involves more than looking at a couple of headers. Almost all of them leave enough fingerprints in the headers and page source to identify them. The tools for identifying what runs a web site have a lot more sophistication than you think, in the same way Facebook and Google don't need to see my driver's license to know a whole lot about me.
It’s been a few years since my last US visit, but my experience has been that Uber (and Lyft) are much better in the States than Uber in Australia.
Frequent cancellations, or a driver just not moving until you cancel the ride, is a major issue in Melbourne. Airport pickup is now basically no different than getting a taxi from the taxi rank. UberEats drivers will often just leave food at a different house on our street, or not at all, even though there is no issue with how our house is marked on maps. There is no quality control with Uber Comfort; 90% of the time it’ll be the same thrashed Camry being used for UberX. I could go on.
We’ve stopped using UberEats as a bunch of restaurants we like have alternative options, but I’m surprised the taxi industry here haven’t gotten their game together. At least among my social group, which are moderate Uber users, the sentiment towards Uber (and the available clones, ie Didi) is negative and if there was any decent competition then we’d all switch in a heartbeat.
How many of them saved it and then reuploaded it elsewhere? Sorry, but talking about protecting the privacy of people who upload things for anyone to see just seems silly to me.
Is there a hardware platform better suited for these types of use cases?
Not that long ago it seemed the tradeoff was either use a cheap but unreliable hobby platform (RPi or Arduino), or a stable but expensive (and usually somewhat custom) platform that involves picking the right components, board design, etc. Espressif sounds like they might be filling this gap, but it’s been a long time since I’ve looked seriously at any of this.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06-04/why-australians-arent...