It happened in the PHP community as well, facebook being the poster child, but Yahoo also had a fair number of internal optimizations and I saw a few other companies tweak their way to get better perf/security.
Then comes a point where the community catches on and has bigger momentum than the company, so it makes sense to move to the standard implementation.
I'd kinda see Google's Borg -> k8s move as slightly similar, though they're the one inviting the community around the standard they built themselves.
k8s is not allowed to use in the most projects utilizing the internal stack, at least yet. In fact, it hasn't reached to the feature parity level necessary to replace any big projects running on Borg.
If you genuinely believe that you have better understanding on how Google's internal infrastructure is running, you should be able to provide better evidence than "other companies can do".
Im sorry but this statement is pretty funny to anyone who has seen google’s internal infra. Where are those companies who run like 10-20k machine kubernetes clusters?
They are. At this point it's a completely different language with its own stack, as far as I know that will be a core component for the forseable future.
Now they also have modern PHP and some other languages alongside with hack from what I understand.
It’s not completely different, it’s still mostly the same language with some big additions. If you read their dev blog, you’ll see they fixed a bug that was also present in php a few months ago.
They run k8s on borg. From what I can tell as someone that worked a lot on early k8s and a large GCP customer they still use borg mostly internally. k8s is their path to creating cloud portability and neutralizing AWS "network" effects.
The days of running /index.php for your own forum or script are indeed in the rear view. But it's still very big for small to medium enterprise, where Java + Spring would be excessive. Most of my local web consultancies who produce things like ticketing websites or specialised directories will reach for it.
But maybe the php forums + guestbooks was what you had in mind with 'php community', in that case you have a point. Most of the kids have moved on.
You’re crazy if you think PHP is dying. Development on the language is steadily pushing forward with big QoL improvements coming to 8.4 later this year.
The popular frameworks are still growing steadily and WordPress is starting to slowly shift off some of its stranglehold on old versions now that most webhosts don’t even offer old versions. That said, even Wordpress will work out of the box with old versions (they just don’t write new features against new PHP versions).
This is arguably the most exciting time to be a PHP dev!
Dude, go to TIOBE, stackoverflow survey, Google Trends or basically any ranking/metric that compares programming language popularity and user base, and without any question php is getting less and less usage over the last few years, often even ignored. Fewer and fewer job postings mention PHP at all. These are my first hand observations, if you don't believe it, you are welcome to look it up right now.
Meh, as far as I can see PHP has a ton of very active development around web services and frameworks, which is its core value proposition. PHP as a language should probably slow down in general but the people who use it don't seem to be really dying out or slowing down as much as the bubble leads us to believe.
People hate php for no reason. They talk about performance or whatever while building rest crud apps. Literally any language can handle that easily and your bottleneck is usually the database. I've scaled startups on PHP to hundreds of thousands of users running on a few cheap ec2 instances. But no one wants to build new php projects instead focusing on Go, Python, or Ruby. I honestly don't get it. PHP devs earn less. The syntax is super easy to pick up. Don't you want cheaper labor?
I've started to learn the ecosystems of the other languages. It's all the same shit. Really.
I think most people experienced PHP as the guilty party behind a lot of really, really terrible LAMP stack projects, but most of the time it was because mod_php was serving requests.
I used PHP to run some service workers managed with supervisord and it was fine. I just get annoyed with the class-based hierarchy but I'd guess they've evolved since 2017 or whenever I used it last.
I think php has a gentler learning curve, but you still need the same level of expertise to get something decent out of the door. From the recruiting side it's still a PITA to find good engineers and it's reflected in the final cost of hiring. I might be biased, but moving jobs every now and then had more impact than doing php or ruby (the other contender would be nodejs, I think go and python tend to be used on different purposes or complementary to the web stack)
I’ve written PHP off and on since the .php3 extension was a thing. People had very good reasons to hate PHP then. It’s greatly improved, but largely due to the composer ecosystem helping to paper over the worse bits. The global functions are still an awful mess.
Composer’s means of including packages doesn’t do the language any favours imo — it doubles down on namespaces (and complex PSR 4/7 ones at that) and the cli isn’t particularly intuitive.
To me, what PHP needs is a simple module system with scoped functions and variables, an object literal syntax rather than `new \stdClass`, and first-class simple to use threading/async/promises for concurrent requests and IO.
There was a lot of tension relative to where PHP would be going, but php7 got it out of the tunnel (in no small parts because of hack, as you mention, buy not only). Some companies diversified before that, in particular moving to nodejs for instance, but others took php from there as it got a lot of attention again, and php8 didn't disappoint either.
There's still a ton of stuck that could be fixed, and php will always be talked down in some way or another but I don't think it's in a bad position as it is now. There's pretty significant code bases newly built on php right now, even if it's not making the headlines.
Those stats are based on public information so if someone starts a private project you won't even know it. It makes sense that a mature ecosystem would have fewer open source new projects.
My opinion is that there isn't anybody else providing the numbers because it's impossible to get a correct number. Suppose Google homepage runs PHP, google.com/a uses Go, google.com/b uses Django, netflix.com use a custom framework running on Node.js, and facebook.com uses an unknown framework. W3 will happily tell you that the entire google.com is powered by php, fail to attribute netflix to JavaScript, and won't count facebook.com at all. That's exactly what's happening with their methodology. They only attribute each website at most once and rely on decade old hints from headers and error pages that are often non existent on newer/in-house web frameworks these days.
Want a real example? Everybody knows that Instagram runs Python. But https://w3techs.com/sites/info/instagram.com can't tell which server side language it runs. There you have it.
I would not use the number unless it can be validated, rather than use it simply because it's "the best we have". No, it's not even remotely good.
Then comes a point where the community catches on and has bigger momentum than the company, so it makes sense to move to the standard implementation.
I'd kinda see Google's Borg -> k8s move as slightly similar, though they're the one inviting the community around the standard they built themselves.