PHP is really tough! Steady in the top ten!

The annual job-hopping season is coming again. Now that the epidemic control has been relaxed, the employment situation may recover. Many developers are preparing for the "Gold, Three, Silver and Four". So do you know which programming languages ​​​​are in high demand in the market?

Not long ago, the foreign website DevJobsScanner analyzed data from the past 14 months (2021.10-2022.11) and screened out job opportunities with clear requirements for programming languages ​​from 12 million developer job requirements. , which summarized and refined the 8 programming languages ​​with the highest demand in 2022.

Among them, Javascript/Typescript undoubtedly occupies a dominant position. Nearly one-third of job opportunities require knowledge of Javascript/Typescript, while Python and Java will be the second and third respectively in 2022. The most in-demand programming language, C# follows closely behind.

Complete chart of programming languages ​​and their respective requirements in 2022

More surprisingly, PHP ranks fifth . This nearly thirty-year-old programming language has been criticized several times, but in this survey, researchers found that there are still 226,000 jobs for PHP, accounting for about 10%. And it’s worth noting that in October 2021, PHP accounted for about 5% of all development employment opportunities, but by November 2022, this proportion has almost doubled.

1. Old and ever-increasing language: once included in the top five dislikes

“PHP is the best in the world Language." In the programming language community, this has been a long-standing meme, and it even developed into a bit of black humor later on. Over the years, it is not uncommon to say that "PHP will die" or "PHP is dead", but to this day, the language is still strong.

But objectively speaking, there are still many developers who don't like PHP. In the Stack OverFlow survey, PHP was even selected into the top five most hated languages. But if a language can survive in the long history, it must have some tricks.

Looking back at the development history of PHP, it is not unexciting. Its ups and downs can be said to reflect the development of the entire Internet.

The founder of PHP is Rasmus Lerdorf, a programmer born in Greenland. Rasmus developed PHP in 1994 for his own work, but he later revealed in interviews that he never thought about turning it into a programming language. Initially, nothing in this tool kit was designed to be a tool.

"I really don't like programming. I developed this tool to reduce the effort of programming, so that I can simply reuse code that I don't know how to stop, and I never intended to I have to write a programming language […]. I actually have no idea how to write a programming language at all, I just keep adding the next logical step.”

But it’s this kind of “unintentional” The behavior of inserting willows became the starting point of PHP. In the PC Internet era, PHP quickly ushered in its peak of glory.

At that time, 80% of online websites were developed in PHP language. Taobao, Yahoo and Sohu all had PHP. At that time, PHP was used to make the website's front-end and back-end without separation, while HTML CSS JS jQuery became a standard skill for developers. For example, Facebook, the popular social software at the time, had a dedicated team to perform secondary performance optimization on PHP.

PHP, which is very suitable for rapid website building, was indeed called "the best Web language in the world" at the time. Until the rise of the mobile Internet, a group of Internet giants represented by Tencent began to develop a variety of popular mobile apps based on smartphones. The front and back ends gradually separated, and PHP also began to decline. In the following years, it was quickly replaced by Java, Python and other languages ​​have conquered the city.

Some people lament that in an era when everyone is keen on chasing new things, PHP is like an old man who doesn't like to hype and doesn't want to sell his hometown. This argument fits well with the stereotype in the minds of many developers. In their minds, PHP has been stagnant for a long time. But in fact, if you are willing to spend a little time to understand it, you can find that the official PHP team has been continuously maintaining and iterating new versions.

In addition to improvements in performance, today's PHP is also doing very well in frameworks such as Laravel and ThinkPHP.

In the PHP 8.2 version released in December 2022, new support for defining constants in traits, introduction of "Random" extension and "read-only" class, Disjunctive Normal Form (DNF) type, updated The MIME type table of the built-in web server has been added, the memory usage of strings returned by various functions has been reduced, JIT performance analysis generation of macOS Instrument has been initially supported, arc4random_buf has been enabled for Linux, and Glibc 2.36 or above has been introduced for random bytes.

The pace of PHP updates is slow and steady. It can be seen that in the programming world where new languages ​​​​are emerging one after another, PHP presents a posture of "getting stronger with age" and "ambitious".

2. Return to the top ten, attribution is still to make "quick" money

Currently, although PHP's market share has declined, it is still the main developer of Web development language. Not long ago, in the programming language rankings for January 2023 announced by Tiobe, PHP climbed to the tenth place, which can be called "steady happiness."

Tiobe announced the programming language rankings for January 2023

But PHP is still often criticized. A typical point is that PHP is mainly suitable for rapid development of web projects with medium concurrency and light-weight script task development. It may be preferred for individuals or start-up companies to build websites, but it is not suitable for truly large-scale projects.

To put it simply, the advantages and disadvantages of the PHP language are very clear, which has also resulted in the normal situation of "haters hate themselves and lovers love themselves".

The advantages of PHP are:

First, it is friendly to novices, has a low entry barrier, and is conducive to monetization: many people can make good things after just a few months of self-study. Able to apply for jobs and take orders. A developer once said with emotion: "As a grassroots self-taught person who switched to the Internet, my ability to successfully change careers and get rid of a job I don't like to a work and life I like can be said to rely entirely on several PHP-based tools. Open source software."

Second, the development speed is fast and the development cost is low: a small and medium-sized Web project can be completed in one to three months. Moreover, the classic combination of PHP "LAMP (Linux Apache Mysql PHP)" is open source and free, and has immediate results in controlling costs.

Third, it is cross-platform: Since PHP is a script that runs on the server side, it can run under UNIX, LINUX, WINDOWS, and Mac OS. The newly released PHP 8.2 version has preliminary support for cross-platform creation on the Windows for ARM64 platform, allocating the JIT buffer Opcache close to the PHP.text field to allow the use of direct IP-related calls and jumps.

The shortcomings of PHP are also clear at a glance:

First, although there are many job opportunities, the overall salary is low: whether in first-tier cities or second-tier and third-tier cities, PHP positions There is a lot of demand, but the salary and benefits can only be said to be average or even generally low. The more intuitive reason is that when technology is on the rise, at the forefront of popularity, and relying on giants to enjoy the benefits, income will naturally rise. But when technology has passed its peak and is declining, the proportion of "great masters" among practitioners will naturally decline. It is also difficult to increase income levels.

Second, the language lacks depth attributes and has little room for growth. Since getting started with PHP does not require the use of underlying features, it is difficult for a single PHPer to gain access to the underlying code. If you don't want to hang yourself from a tree, you must learn other languages ​​​​after learning PHP, such as Java, Go, etc., in order to truly open up space for skill expansion.

Third, the scope of application is limited and rarely used in large-scale project development. As some developers believe, Java can also be developed with PHP. For example, although PHP can also implement multi-threaded high concurrency functions, it is mainly aimed at small and medium-sized websites. If it is an online shopping system like a large mall, choose Java in practice. The results are often better.

3. The best language: the "hard-core" players who have been criticized

Generally speaking, there has always been a chain of contempt for programming languages, and there is nothing Language will be well received by everyone. It's just as common for someone to hate PHP as it is for someone to hate JavaScript, C, or Python. But it is undeniable that PHP is indeed very suitable for web development and rapid website building. It is quick to get started, has low cost and has many open source frameworks. As mentioned above, it does provide a large number of jobs.

In the Zhihu forum, "Have you insisted on using PHP, how do you feel now?" Under this question, the common emotion is: Although many people think that PHP is a thing of the past, but for individual entrepreneurs and For small and medium-sized enterprises, PHP is still the first choice for rapid development projects. Even though it has been pessimistic for so many years, PHP is still very active today. As the friend in the picture below describes it - it is really "hard-working".

Zhihu user answer excerpt

Recommended learning: "PHP Video Tutorial"