I have no metrics on this but I was under the impression that due to the size of the PHP community the package ecosystem specifically for web is probably larger. The community itself being larger is of course another plus as it means you're able to get easier access to the knowledge of others.
Thirdly of course the shared hosting providers (by what I've seen in the past) usually support PHP almost always - this is not the case for either Ruby or Python.
'larger' in terms of what? I don't know what you'd have to do 'specifically for web' that you'd find yourself writing python and thinking 'damn shame there's no package for this'; and JavaScript's must be way (overly) 'larger' (package count) than that.
Yup, for web stuff you’re right. Python has a larger overall user base, but much of that usage is in non-web contexts, whereas PHP is pretty single-mindedly focussed on websites.
I didn't even realize shared hosting providers still existed. I thought everything was virtualized and containerized. But indeed, sites like Gandi.net sell shared hosting.
> While providing comparable development experience / ease of use.
I would argue with that.
Part of my job is writing a lot of PHP currently (Hack actually, but they are very similar). Sometimes it's OK, but sometimes early PHP design decision to make code always appear working correctly and avoid raising user-visible errors really make me wish I was coding in another language. One of latest examples: when converting string to floating point number, sometimes you get 0.0 in case of parsing error, sometimes part of string is ignored.
Yes, PHP has some warts, but so do ruby & javascript [1], python [2], and all other similar languages. The keyword to look for people explaining some of these warts is "wat" (popularized by the talk at [1] I think).
I wouldn't say it's unfounded but anecdotal. And I wouldn't necessarily call it "hate" either. PHP definitely isn't one of those technologies that you see often on job listings of major companies - sure they might use it for some things such as blogs but it's rarely part of the stack of their staple products. The question isn't whether they use it but to what extent and in what products.
On a quick search of PHP skills wanted on LinkedIn jobs I found the following large companies looking for it:
Apple,
Cloudflare,
Vimeo,
Box,
Slack,
Tesla,
Etsy,
Wayfair,
Shopify,
Facebook,
Etc
Clearly WordPress and Magento based businesses. Add in Facebook, Weebly/Square, and you realize that PHP probably drives more page views and powers more domain named sites than any other.
Edge Not Found is such a good idea. I love it! A full fledged unique puzzle game could probably be built around this concept if the authors wanted to expand on it - although I'm probably stating the obvious. Pretty sure Hollow Knight has its origins in a game jam and it would be nice if this competition yielded a success like that. (mostly because I want to play more of it)
A lot of people seem to be happy about the possibility here in the comments and I can't really blame them. But one thing to consider is the impact this would have. I have a client with a small-ish e-commerce website that gets about 80% of revenue from Facebook ad campaigns and promotions. They spent a lot of time tinkering with that and optimizing it to improve sales of physical goods in all the areas they can ship to. This is of course an anecdotal example but I imagine there's a fair amount of small business that rely heavily on Facebook like that. There's also businesses where Facebook is an important tool for direct communication with customers.
There are tons of small shops, small radio stations doing the same all over world including EU.
But ... there were tons such small shops, and small stations before there was Facebook.
Right now Facebook is best tool for them. If facebook goes by by, they will go to second best tool.
They will find out new way to promote them self, it might just work in their favor, since there will be a lot of smaller competitors in that space, there will be innovation and at least in the beginning cheaper ads.
Neither online marketing nor "Social" Networks will ever be gone from this world.
If Facebook is replaced by the next thing, it just means that the data is not longer officially siphoned off to the NSA but only to local agencies.
I doubt much will change for (most) users or small businesses. There will be some collateral damage and for some it will indeed be devastating but the overwhelming majority won't notice much.+
Gosh, that's kind of sad, but platform upheavals happen all the time. I hope that whatever platform their market shifts to isn't too hard to figure out. Hopefully it will even be an improvement!
A platform is usually supplanted by something else. Big auto supplanted big horse drawn carriage. Jet engines pushed out propeller engines. Murdering EU Facebook with nothing is like ripping out grandma’s USA made hearing aids until & hoping a local starts a hearing aid company.
How Futurist of you. It's sad for the people who lose out in those transitions. I'm not saying we should hold back progress but we should be mindful of the impacts on society. With that said net impact in this case is probably less than zero.
There are plenty of successful businesses that have adapted to, and thrived after, way more radical things than a social platform pulling out of one of its markets. There are plenty of small businesses that are doing fine, and have been doing fine, since before the Internet era, let alone Facebook.
Surely this wouldn't have a non-zero impact but nothing lasts forever -- especially not free services! Dealing with that is an integral part of doing business.
Besides, it's not like this will result in a complete communication blackout. If indeed the service Facebook is providing is valuable, there are plenty of other companies that will jump in. A little competition never hurt anyone ;).
My experience has been the exact opposite. As soon as I need to look up something very specific or niche DDG does not deliver and that's when I need it the most.
Google's index is 4x bigger (I can't recall the specific numbers but it was mentioned in a recent competition report in the UK)- I'd expect Google to be better at returning long tail stuff where perhaps Bing (and thus DDG) simply don't have the depth of documents to return.
/edit here's the quote/source
"We found that Google’s index is larger than that of Bing in terms of number of pages in the index. Based on submissions from these parties, Google’s index contains around [500 -600 billion] pages and Microsoft’s index contains around [100- 200 billion] pages."
I guess it's because the bottom and top bar look like their edges are actually touching which should be impossible with the middle bar going between them without it being squished.
Sure, one would want Adobe to be the liable party in such a case. But that case wouldn't be too different from the current one, where the problem is Windows failing to warn on a file that is otherwise harmless which becomes harmful when opened by a piece of third-party software.
As the poster above hinted a lot of public offices have outdated hardware and software that is not a consideration for a lot of developers. Mobile represents ~50% of traffic among the public - not among the people who were selecting the developer using the "archaic" technology that they have in their offices.
