Re: Changing fundamental language behaviors
| From: | Zeev Suraski | Date: | Thu, 12 Sep 2019 22:09:43 +0000 |
| Subject: | Re: Changing fundamental language behaviors | ||
| References: | 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 | Groups: | php.internals |
| Request: | Send a blank email to internals+get-107030@lists.php.net to get a copy of this message | ||
On Fri, Sep 13, 2019 at 12:35 AM Lynn <kjarli@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 12, 2019 at 10:58 PM Peter Bowyer <phpmailinglists@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> >
> > One can argue that WordPress, with it powering 34% of the web (source:
> > wordpress.org) represents more than 50% of PHP users, and therefore
> > aligning the language to how they use it would be sensible, as they are
> the
> > majority of users. PHP and WordPress have had a symbiotic relationship,
> the
> > success of one increasing the success of the other.
> >
>
> How many of those are actually developers? Because the way I understand
> this numbers, "powering the web", that doesn't mean 34% are also
> developers. It wouldn't surprise me if a big portion of these applications
> could've also be a system written in another language, deployed, plugins
> installed, added some themes and done, no PHP knowledge required.
>
Many are. The WP developer ecosystem footprint is at the same order of
magnitude as (and in some geographics larger than) that of 'generic' PHP -
in terms of conferences and conference sizes, usergroups, available jobs,
etc. I don't think any of us can pull numbers off of our sleeves - but the
vast majority of folks who deploy WordPress sites that I bumped into also
deal with at least some custom PHP code - and are responsible for the
deployment whether they wrote it or not. It's true that there are many
agencies and freelancers that do a lot more than one site. But it's also
true that the WordPress numbers are enormous even if we cut them down by a
factor of 10 (which I believe would be big exaggeration)
And of course, the can be said about PHP apps in general - many developers
produce a lot more than just one site. So while there's no 1:1 correlation
between the number of sites and the number of developers, it's true for
both WP and generic PHP (perhaps in slightly different scales). And of
course #2 - we're not only talking about WordPress - non-WP developers will
be affected by this as well.
Zeev