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Simon Yousoufov argues that PHP is going the way of the dodo.

It’s well known that PHP is a dead programming language and that its 22-year-old ecosystem is effectively useless now that we have Node and its fancy new asynchronous frameworks. Node’s superiority is evident because everyone knows that single-threaded, asynchronous, programs are better by default. Faster. Stronger, even.

https://medium.com/fuzz/php-a0d0b1d365d8

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PHP 7 is gaining ground fast

Jordi Boggiano shared some new stats on PHP version usage he collects via Packagist.

A few observations: 5.3 and 5.4 at this point are gone as far as I am concerned! 5.5 still has a good presence but lost 12% in 6 months which is awesome. 5.6 basically stayed stable as I suspect people jumped from 5.5 to 7 directly probably when upgrading Ubuntu LTS. 7.0 gained 15% and is now close to being the most deployed version, 1 year after release! That should definitely encourage more libraries to require it IMO, and I hope it is good encouragement to PHP internals folks as well to see that people actually upgrade these days :)

It's very cool that PHP 7 is being adopted so quickly. I suspected that it would go down this way. Unfortunately the majority of package creators are still targeting PHP 5. Jordi has this to say on that.

As I wrote in the last update: I would like to encourage everyone to be a bit more aggressive in bumping PHP requirements when tagging new major releases of their libs. Don't forget that the old code does not go away, it's still there to be used by people using legacy PHP versions.

Amen!

Read Jordi's blogpost here: https://seld.be/notes/php-versions-stats-2016-2-edition

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PHP 7 usage at 20% according to Packagist stats

Jordi Boggiano, the creator and maintainer of Composer and Packagist, released some fresh statistics on which PHP version composer users are running.

A few observations: 5.3 dropped to almost nothing which is great news! 5.4 is also down by almost 10% and is definitely on the way out. 5.5 is still big but less so, while 5.6 got a huge boost to become the main version. The big surprise is that we have 20% of PHP7 already! That is great news only six months after this major release came out.

20% sounds really great, but I suspect that this number is slightly optimistic. Many developers who are running PHP 7 in their dev environment use PHP 5.X in production.

Over on the package side only ±20% of all packages require PHP 5.5 or above and only 1% requires PHP 7. Jordi has this to say about that:

All in all, it seems like package requires are way behind actual version usage, so I would like to encourage everyone to be a bit more aggressive in bumping PHP requirements when tagging new major releases of their libs.

That's great advice. The bulk of the newly released Spatie packages require PHP 7. In my opinion you'd do our ecosystem a favour by picking PHP 7 as a minimum requirement when you are creating a new package.

Read Jordi's entire post on his blog for more details: https://seld.be/notes/php-versions-stats-2016-1-edition

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