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This dubious 78% statistic has been discussed to death in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28510520.

The submitted title is badly editorialized and leaves out the actual point of the article: only "1% on PHP 8" despite a whopping 78% total, if we take the dubious statistic at face value.

For the record, the submitted title is "78% of the Web Powered by PHP" at the time of this comment.


If you look at the web by urls not weighted by traffic, you’ll come across the unfathomably large swath of autogenerated spam blogs. For every legitimate business in the world there are 100 people trying to ‘make money online’ paying for scripts that register and post spun content on thousands of domains. The long tail of the internet is an absolute wasteland. It’s tech choices should have little bearing on the rest of us.


To be fair [1] 8.0 is less than a year old.

It's also a bit unwise to jump right into a point zero release when you could wait for point one release with more of the bugs ironed out.

8.1 just hit RC4 [2] five days ago. I'd say after the final RC is approved we will start to see an increase in PHP 8 usage. Even more so after Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release.

[1] https://www.php.net/archive/2020.php#2020-11-26-3

[2] https://www.php.net/archive/2021.php#2021-10-14-1


Yes, thank you. The site's methodology disclaimer explains this is the percentage of sites for which they could automatically determine the language in use on the server. Newer web languages don't include a header telling you the language and version in use at all, and if web frameworks add one, security auditors will always make you remove it.

So the real statistic is 78% of websites that are written in a dynamic scripting language, don't get pen-tested, or don't care about security, are written in PHP. That's a very different statistic than 78% of all servers that will respond to an HTTP request.


So 78% by PHP but 77% below PHP version 8. OK


It's a CLI, not a TUI. I put quite a bit of thought into that decision, and whether to integrate a pager. See [1]. The workarounds are (1) limit the number of results per page with -n <num>; (2) use the -r, --reverse option to show the top results last.

[1] https://github.com/jarun/googler/issues/281


It would be nice if there was a way to run a terminal command without auto-scrolling. So often I run something that spits out tons of error messages, only to have to scroll back up again to find out what happened.


Also check if your terminal supports Shift-PgUp/PgDn to scroll up/down a page.

Works in gnome terminal: https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-terminal/stable/adv-keybo...


You can use whatever textual browser if you want to.


I'm a maintainer of googler (though I haven't put in much work for quite a while) and the author of the linked document. No, it doesn't use a screen scraper, and I don't know how you even got that idea.


Is this perhaps a semantics issue? The linked document mentions parsing HTML, and that layout updates can break it. How would you describe the way googler operates?

Edit: Would ”web scraping” be a more apt description?


Yes, it's a scraper extracting results from HTML. Which is very different from a screen scraper...


People who own a Linux workstation at home and just want to play a few games is vastly outnumbered by people who own a Windows desktop at hone and just want to play a few games. Probably at least 100 to 1. And the former group, with the “almost works” compatibility, will be a much bigger maintenance burden per customer.

Heck, I’d bet money that the Linux casual gaming crowd you described is also heavily outnumbered by people who have a dedicated Windows gaming PC (e.g. me, Mac user otherwise).


You're neglecting the crowd that have Windows at home and want to stop using it also. If gamers can have the exact same UX on Linux then that's one of the biggest obstacles to switching solved.


Like me. I will hug windows 7 goodbye on my way to Neon OSville, with redoubled hope my sim City 3k and rct2 may now work without having to be in a VM


"People who own a Linux workstation at home and just want to play a few games" make up a disproportionately large amount of the developer-base for pretty much any software, though, including games. It doesn't matter if none of your users care about a particular feature, if a fair number of your own devs do.


There are lots of developers pretty happy with macOS and Windows at home.


Yeah, but for a piece of software to acquire Linux support, you don’t need the majority of its developers to own a Linux workstation and want to use the software with it; you just need a non-negligible amount (i.e. enough developers with the spare man-hours to get the work done.)

Sometimes, in fact, it only takes one or two developers. I can’t think of a good Linux example here, but I know of a good few projects (Dolphin, for example) where the macOS target is supported entirely by the one or two developers on the team who use macOS.


Quite true, my comment was more against the typical HN remark that "developers" only use GNU/Linux, as if the software for the two biggest desktop environments would appear out of thin air.


> This lets them say "See! the Chinese are worse!"

Seriously? Even if one believes in this Chinese colonialism thing, there's no way in hell partial economic control is worse than genocides and slavery that accompanied European colonialism in the past.



Unlike the fallacy you linked, which is comparing apples to oranges, I made a direct comparison of "colonialism" to colonialism, in response to a direct comparison of "colonialism" to colonialism. Not every comparison is whataboutism, you know.


The relevance can be clarified if we frame it like this: "My economic control in a foreign nation is okay because you're lynching negroes (or did so in the past)."


gp: Europeans feel guilty about the colonial past, so they try very hard to make the Chinese look worse.

me: How can it be worse?

Neither gp nor me mentioned anything being "okay", or blamed any party for completely irrelevant crimes (lynching or whatever). Might need to brush up on reading comprehension.


Have you ever had the (dis)pleasure of porting to Windows? It’s a pile of hot garbage that keeps on accumulating because of so precious backwards compatibility; every single idiosyncrasy from thirty years ago lives on for ever.


Yea, I wrote windows code for 10 years and while it has its warts I will say the ETW subsystem is much more thought out. The ntdll way of abstracting syscalls is also a lot nicer and something Linux should consider.

The biggest problem with Linux is it doesn't have a coherent design philosophy. So some subsystems are nice and others are horrendous. Knowledge of one subsystem may lead to misleading assumptions about another part of the kernel.

An example is the kernel supposedly doesn't have threads, they are just processes that share address space. But of course other parts do in fact need to understand that there is one coherent bundle of threads that compose this abstract idea of a process. So some places differentiate between thread id and process ids and others mix them. Windows has its inconsistencies, but not with something so fundamental as a process.


You mean typically “available” in pre-compiled form, right? Because Rust doesn’t have a binary distribution system per se, it is at the mercy of package managers to build and distribute binaries, or maintainers need to upload build artifacts to, say, GitHub releases (and installation process would be nonstandard as a result).

I get most of my Rust binaries through cargo when on Ubuntu, except in a few cases when I really want rg (still not available in Ubuntu 18.04) but don’t want to waste 25% storage on the Rust tool chain.


I'm not sure about geography, but the vast majority of U.S. population is proudly uneducated in mathematics and many hard sciences. Math taught in high schools is pretty laughable and physics isn't even required in many places.

Source: Lived in the U.S. for many years.


I agree that our primary schooling in general is suboptimal and inconsistent across regions. Where I disagree is that we are happy about that at a population level or somehow intentionally undermining education because we enjoy being ignorant (disregarding religious nonsense). In fact, if you look at where people decide to settle, school district quality is often a strongly weighted parameter.


Yeah, "proudly" is probably too harsh, but I do find a general attitude of willful disregard of math and (hard) scientific education in the U.S. I don't think the disregard from policy makers is an accident. Mathematical or scientific reasoning capability is almost nonexistent in the average Joe, and if you look Ph.D. programs in math or hard sciences in any prestigious university, or maybe any university, you see a very international community of students — a marked shift from undergraduate programs. Not saying everyone needs to hold a Ph.D. in math or science, but the overall ignorance means any quantitative argument among a general audience usually meets indifference, confusion or blind acceptance/rejection (at least in my experience). I find this rather frustrating. You know, one can usually pick up humanities and social sciences stuff any time in their life (which usually only involves reading), but there are relatively few examples of self-teaching math and hard sciences later in life, and a good chunk of that subculture seems to end up in the crackpot bucket.


Strangely, living in the U.S. for many years doesn't qualify you as a credible source, just as someone who's collected a bunch of anecdotes.


"Math taught in high schools is pretty laughable" is somewhat subjective but a general observation and evaluation (this is actually easily observable even as an outsider, by looking at SAT Math, AP Math, etc.); "physics isn't even required in many places" is a fact. Neither is a bunch of anecdotes.

My degrees are in mathematics and physics, and I've tutored students in elite colleges, so I know a thing or two.


I once had an ISP (non-U.S., won't name it here) that injects ads into plain HTTP. Didn't realize it was the ISP until I once accidentally loaded my personal website over plain HTTP.

Turns out to get rid of that, I just had to call them and complain about it; they pretended to be surprised and asked me for details, but after the phone call the injection stopped. Worked for other people too.


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