Shocking PHP Breakthrough: The Language Everyone Buried Has Broken into the Top 5 Most Loved by Developers

According to the results of the 2019 Stack Overflow annual developer survey, the IT world faced an unexpected surprise: the PHP programming language, which many analysts and industry gurus had already written off, unexpectedly entered the top five most "loved" technologies among professional developers. This discovery became one of the most discussed outcomes of the study, which involved nearly 90,000 respondents from 179 countries.

According to the survey data, 73.2% of developers using PHP stated that they would like to continue working with it in the coming year. This indicator allowed PHP to surpass popular languages such as C# (72.1%) and TypeScript (70.4%), securing fifth place in the ranking after Python, JavaScript, Go, and Rust. For comparison, a year earlier PHP occupied only the 11th position, making the current leap particularly impressive.

"PHP is a dinosaur that has learned to dance," comments Sarah Jenkins, a leading backend engineer from Zend. "With the release of PHP 7.x and the active development of frameworks like Laravel, the language has ceased to be just a tool for quick websites. Today it is a powerful, statically typed (using attributes and types) tool for creating high-load systems. Developers have finally appreciated its performance and ecosystem for what they are worth."

Interestingly, the growth in PHP's popularity correlates with its increased use in the corporate sector. While PHP was previously associated exclusively with WordPress and small websites, today giants such as Facebook (via HipHop), Wikipedia, and Slack run on it. The Stack Overflow survey also showed that PHP maintains strong positions in web development: 26.4% of all professional web developers use it as their primary language.

However, there were skeptics as well. Critics note that the "love" for PHP may be related to its low entry barrier and the large amount of legacy code that no one is rewriting. Nevertheless, the numbers speak for themselves: PHP is not only surviving but thriving, occupying a worthy place in the 2019 developer preference ranking.

For the Python community, this is also an important signal: the battle for developers' minds continues, and even the oldest languages are capable of a renaissance if their community actively develops tools and improves performance.