What is PHP?
PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) is a widely preferred server-side programming language. While it is an open-source as well as a platform-independent programming language, it is also simple to use, and easy to understand and learn.
From version 1 in ’95, v2 in ’97, v3 in ’98 and v4 in 2000, PHP saw a steady growth in popularity. With v5 in 2004, the community adopted this server-side language to the point that by 2015, around 80% of the websites across the world, were using PHP to some extent. Of these, 0.1% run in PHP v3, 0.7% in v4, 76% are still running in v5.6 and v7 has around 22.8% of the total.
The growth of the PHP language as a technology has been impressive and for the last 24 years it’s still one of the most popular languages used by brands like Yahoo, Facebook, Wikipedia, Flickr, WordPress, Friendster, Digg, Source Forge, iStockPhoto, and MailChimp.
PHP Workforce
Across LinkedIn, there are currently around 3.2 million developers and programmers with various programming skills worldwide. Of these, around 644.000 have PHP as a skillset. Critics often argue that PHP is a dying language, yet 20.1% of developers worldwide have it in their tech stack. PHP is used by developers across the globe; India 16.3%, United States 14.7%, United Kingdom 4.8%, Canada 4.2%, Indonesia 2.5%, Ukraine 2.5%, Italy 2.4%, Spain 2.3%, Pakistan 2.2% and Netherlands 2%.
According to LinkedIn, around 2.1% of PHP developers have 1 year of experience in the IT Sector. 12% have 3-5 yoe (years of experience), 22.4% have 3-5yoe, 29% have 6-10yoe and 22% have over 10yoe.
It is very hard to verify whether these developers still actively use PHP. Many may have shifted towards other techs and may not even use PHP. Nevertheless, these figures do enable one to get a grasp of the sheer number of PHP developers across the globe.
In Europe, there are around 341,000 IT professionals with PHP on their profile with a wide variety of job titles (DevOps, Testers, Designers, Lead, Scrum Masters, Project Managers, Managing roles, etc). 183,245 of this subset are Developers or Programmers and are spread across the EU; UK 17.4%, Spain 8.2%, Italy 8%, France 7.8%, Netherlands 7%, Ukraine 6.9%, Germany 6.8%, Poland 5.7%, Romania 3.6% and Sweden 3.3%.
Top Frameworks Used
From this total of 341,000 IT professionals, around 35,700 use Symfony 10.4% (of which 20,800 are still devs or programmers). France appears to be the epicentre of Symphony playing host to 16% of all Symphony users. Paris alone encompasses 6.6% of the entire subset. Second on the list is Poland hovering around the 10% mark with Spain coming close behind at 9.9%. The UK (8.9%), Ukraine (8.6%), Germany (7.1%), The Netherlands (5.8%), Italy (4.3%) and Romania (3.9%) are home to the majority of European Symphony users outside of France and Spain.
The laravel framework, which is based on Symphony, is used by approximately 40,900 or 12% of European PHP professionals. The highest concentration of laravel users is in the UK (14%) with Ukraine coming in second at 11%. The Netherlands is home to 8.4% of laravel users, Spain has 6.4%, Poland has 5%, Italy has 4.9%, Germany has 4.7%, Romania has 4.6%, France has 4.1% with Serbia finishing the list with 3.1%.
Zend also has a big share of PHP professionals with 24,445 of 7.1% of PHP professionals opting to use the framework. Magento is / was used by 19,664 people, CodeIgniter 18,209, Yii 10,700, CakePHP 7,922, Slim 2,247, Phalcon 1,972, Lumen 1,358 and FuelPHP 743.
The numbers are clear evidence that contrary to what many critics argue, PHP is not a dying language and in fact still plays a large role within the IT industry.
Looking for a PHP job? See our full list of PHP vacancies here.
Posted by Adam Dunne on 12 June 2019