PHP sinks in Tiobe language popularity index

PHP, long a popular server-side scripting language for web development, has dropped to its lowest position ever in the monthly Tiobe index of programming language popularity, ranking 17th in the April 2024 edition of the index.

When the Tiobe index started in 2001, PHP was about to become the standard language for building websites, said Paul Jansen, CEO of software quality services vendor Tiobe. PHP even reached the top 3 spot in the index, ranking third several times between 2006 and 2010. But as competing web development frameworks such as Ruby on Rails, Django, and React arrived in other languages, PHP’s popularity waned.

“The major driving languages behind these new frameworks were Ruby, Python, and most notably JavaScript,” Jansen noted in his statement accompanying the index. “On top of this competition, some security issues were found in PHP. As a result, PHP had to reinvent itself.” Nowadays, PHP still has a strong presence in small and medium websites and is the language leveraged in the WordPress web content management system. “PHP is certainly not gone, but its glory days seem to be over,” Jansen said.

PHP’s rating in the April index is 1.09%. Tiobe this month also noted a rise in Fortran, which made the top 10. Fortran had not ranked so high since April 2002, based on Tiobe research. The Tiobe index gauges language popularity using a formula that measures the number of skilled engineers worldwide, courses, and third-party vendors pertaining to a language based on searches of websites such as Google, Amazon, and Wikipedia.

The Tiobe index top 10 for April 2024:

1. Python, with a rating of 16.41%.
2. C, 10.21%
3. C++, 9.76%
4. Java, 8.94%
5. C#, 6.77%
6. JavaScript, 2.89%
7. Go, 1.85%
8. Visual Basic, 1.7%
9. SQL, 1.61%
10. Fortran, 1.47%

The rival Pypl Popularity of Programming Language Index, which assesses how often language tutorials are searched on in Google, ranks PHP as the seventh most popular programming language.

The Pypl index top 10 for April 2024:

1. Python, with a 28.43% share
2. Java, 16.04%
3. JavaScript, 8.72%
4. C/C++, 6.65%
5. C#, 6.63%
6. R, 4.63%
7. PHP, 4.45%
8. TypeScript, 2.96%
9. Swift, 2.71%
10. Rust, 2.53%