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Cal Evans is the Director of the PHP Center for Expertise at Ibuildings. He has been involved in IT development and management for the past 26 years and for the past 9 has developed primarily in PHP and MySQL. Cal is the author of a book and many articles on PHP development and can regularly be seen speaking at PHP conferences around the world. Cal blogs regularly at http://blog.calevans.com

Tuesday, August 4. 2009

PHP Rated Top Scripting Language by Evans Data Corp

In their recently released report "Users' Choice: Scripting Language Ratings", Evans Data Corporation (no relation to the author of this article) gave PHP the highest overall ranking of the languages they included in their survey.

The full EDC report can be downloaded here (requires free registration).

Talking with 500 developers who actively use scripting languages, EDC ranked the languages on the following criteria. For each category, we've listed how PHP fared:

ItemPHP's ranking
Ease of Use2nd
Exception handling7th
Extensibility2nd
Maintainability / Readability2nd
Cross-platform portability1st
Community2nd
Availability of tools1st
Quality of tools1st
Performance1st
Memory management4th
Client side scripting9th
Security2nd


As you can see in most aspects, PHP scored first or second place. Given the wide variety of topics, there is no way PHP will ever score first place across the board, however, that is not a bad thing. While it's possible to do client side scripting with PHP, that's not the main focus of the core.

In the one area that the core developers have been focusing on for the past several years, performance, PHP scored first place. This is a testament to the hard work of a lot of very talented developers, worldwide.

What should the PHP community take away from this report, other than an overwhelming sense of pride? I see two things that we as a language need to work on.

  • Exceptions.

    The most obvious is Exception handling. PHP placed 7th for this very important category and rightly so. PHP's Exception handling feels bolted on. Each release gets a bit better but until we can trap every error, warning or notice then PHP will never score high in this category.


  • Memory Management

    Since this report was generated in the early part of 2009, I'm sure they tested the 5.2 branch and not the 5.3 branch. 5.3 did a lot for memory management including memory management for long running processes. Since this is a survey and not a benchmark, they can't 're-run' the survey with 5.3. However, I do expect the score to go up. That having been said, this is one of those areas that we have to constantly improve. We all appreciate the core developers attention to this over the past few years but hope that they won't rest on their laurels.


This is an opinion survey and does not pretend to be objective. That would explain why PHP, with the largest community of any of the languages other than JavaScript would still rank behind Ruby. The report admits that, with respect to Ruby, "despite the hype of Ruby during the last two or three years, its market penetration has been feeble and it is not easy to find Ruby developers". Even so, they go on to say "The Ruby community is quite small but very dedicated and very vocal". The Community score was not based on size or a metric that can be controlled; it was based on how vocal the community is. The Ruby developers, though small, are much more vocal passionate and zealous about their language than the PHP community was. Even so, it was close.

All in all, PHP developers can hold their head up high and know that they have made a good career choice. PHP is the most popular web scripting language. This translates into more opportunities for developers who spend the time to master it.
Posted by Cal Evans in PHP at 08:29 | Comments (4) | Trackback (1)
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A look at the PHP job market
Last week, Cal Evans had an interesting post on this blog about an EDC study on the popularity of programming languages. In the comment section of that post, I had an interesting discussion with Bill Karwin, who suggested that when looking at the job mark
Weblog: Ibuildings Blog
Tracked: Aug 10, 09:19

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That's a kinda odd report. The Evans Data Corp has a slightly surprising definition of "cross-platform portability":

"On the other hand, since most of the apps built with PHP run in a browser, cross-platform support is excellent."

and

"Most PHP apps do run in a browser and PHP developers do not concern themselves with the underlying operating system that hosts the browser. Thus the widely held view that PHP is a cross-platform language."

The discussion in the Memory Management section is mystifying (it implies that only Python, Flex and Perl have automatic memory management), and given that client-side scripting is defined as happening in the browser, it's somewhat surprising that anything other than JavaScript and VB Script manage to score anything at all.

It's nice that PHP has done well, and the results are about how I'd mark PHP, but I think that maybe the Evans Data Corp's reports should be limited to hard numbers and graphs rather than muddy and confused analysis...
#1 Michael Stillwell (Homepage) on 2009-08-04 09:28 (Reply)
Another data point is to search Indeed.com, a job posting aggregator, for trends.

The number of jobs matching "PHP" has been growing rapidly, but is still only a small fraction of job postings. Compare:


  • SQL matches about 5%

  • .NET matches 4%

  • Java matches 3%

  • C++ and C# match 1.5% each

  • Javascript matches 1.5%

  • ASP or ASP.NET matches 1.25%

  • Perl matches 1.0%

  • PHP matches 0.6%

  • Python matches 0.4%

  • Ruby or Rails matches 0.25%

  • ColdFusion matches 0.15%



(these numbers are inexact, based on eyeballing of the trend graph)

I'd be willing to believe that PHP is a favorite language, but the opportunities to earn a living with PHP don't seem to follow from that -- at least not yet.
#2 Bill Karwin (Homepage) on 2009-08-07 05:22 (Reply)
@bill: You have to remember that PHP is a very focused language. It targets web development only. So yes, there are more jobs in java and .net as a whole, but those languages are used for desktop software as well. So within the web ecosystem, I still think php is a favorite.
#2.1 Ivo Jansch (Homepage) on 2009-08-07 09:39 (Reply)
That's true, but if I change the search to "html PHP" and do the same for the other languages with the intention of restricting the search to web programming jobs, the relative order of language popularity by number of jobs matched doesn't change much. Perl drops below PHP, that's about it.

This doesn't reflect anything about the actual popularity of PHP among developers, or its merits as a web programming language. Only the number of jobs that are currently advertised and indexed by Indeed.com.
#2.1.1 Bill Karwin (Homepage) on 2009-08-07 23:20 (Reply)

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