EN
RU
ES
ZH
FR
DE
PT
AR
HI
PHP unexpectedly tops StackOverflow's ranking of programmers' favorite languages
The annual StackOverflow developer survey has become a real sensation for the PHP community. In 2024, a language that for many decades was considered "humble" and even "outdated" took first place in the "Most Loved" category. This event sparked heated discussions in professional circles and forced many to reconsider their attitude towards PHP.
According to official survey data, which involved over 65,000 developers from around the world, PHP received 78.2% of votes from those who work with it. This means that the vast majority of practicing PHP programmers are ready to recommend this language to colleagues and continue using it in new projects. For comparison, Rust took second place with 76.3%, and Python third with 73.8%.
Why did PHP, which for a long time was associated with "hacks" and outdated code, become the leader in love? Experts highlight several key reasons:
- Language evolution. With the release of PHP 8.x, the language received a powerful performance boost, strict typing, attributes, JIT compilation, and modern syntactic constructs. Developers who have tried PHP 8 often compare it to TypeScript or C#.
- Ecosystem and community. Laravel, Symfony, Composer, and other tools have made PHP development fast, secure, and enjoyable. The community actively updates frameworks and libraries, maintaining a high level of quality.
- Ease of entry. PHP remains one of the most accessible languages for beginners. A large amount of documentation, free courses, and built-in support on most hosting platforms make it ideal for starting a career.
- Real projects. WordPress, Drupal, Magento, Laravel applications — PHP powers a huge portion of the internet. Developers see real results from their work, which increases satisfaction.
Interestingly, in the "Most Wanted" category (languages developers want to learn in the next year), PHP also showed unexpectedly high results, taking 5th place. This suggests that even those who do not currently use PHP are showing interest in it.
Of course, the survey has its nuances. The sample mainly included developers who actively use PHP in 2024, not those who left the ecosystem. However, the very fact that PHP outperformed Rust, TypeScript, and Go in "love" is a powerful signal to the market.
For the educational community, this is good news: PHP remains in demand, and learning it is not a thing of the past, but an investment in the future. If you are not yet familiar with modern PHP, now is the time to pay attention to it.
The full report of the StackOverflow 2024 survey is available on the official website. And at PythonLib, we will continue to follow trends and publish relevant materials on all programming languages.
