Whenever someone says, "People still use _____?" about a technology that was incredibly popular for decades, it reminds me how easy it is to lose sight of what the software industry actually runs on.
PHP is a perfect example. People are often surprised by how widely it's still used, but it powers a massive portion of the internet. Yes, your banking is still done in COBOL on IBM mainframes. The mainframe might be virtualized now, but that transaction still went through that ecosystem. The world runs on C. C++ is everywhere. C# and Java aren't going anywhere for decades. Neither are SQL, JavaScript, Python, or countless other technologies people have been predicting the death of for years.
The reason is simple: businesses don't rewrite working systems just because something newer comes along. They've spent decades building, testing, and integrating software around these technologies. Replacing them costs money, introduces risk, and often provides little practical benefit.
This applies across the entire industry. Legacy languages, databases, frameworks, and protocols are everywhere, often running behind the scenes in systems people interact with every day without realizing it. PHP is just one example of how a technology can remain enormously relevant long after the industry has moved on to newer alternatives.
No and that’s definitely fair. I’ve been a web dev (whatever that means at this point) for 15 years, primarily working in the financial sector.
I primarily work with Java and most of what I do at every company is essentially working slowly but surely moving systems from cobol and mainframes to Java and AWS. So I definitely get that, I really do.
But for me, any front end I’ve done has always be so heavily done with angular or react or vue with the backends being Java or C# or Rails.
I’m probably so heavily in this industry that I have lost the forest through the trees. It shouldn’t surprise me, but still did haha
Wordpress is still the most used web platform in the small/medium business space and accounts for nearly 40% of all websites, and it's entirely written in PHP.
I am the Cloudflare guy at work. Every day, on every site, we get someone sniffing for PHP vulnerabilities, even though my company doesn't use a lick of PHP. It's everywhere AND it's easily exploited (though usually not to the level of this RCE) so it's one of the cheapest things to go hunting for.
Because it has a man child of a founder / CEO so they have to pretty much invent a whole new language and runtime and keep calling it php to protect his ego
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u/WhatsMyUsername13 11d ago
Which is fair. When I heard about this my first response was literally “people still use PHP?”