Perforce Zend official compared PHP with Python and Java in a blog post, stressing the continued importance of the ‘silent workhorse of the modern web.’

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PHP remains highly relevant in 2026 despite declining spotlight, powering major platforms like WordPress and Drupal. A Perforce Zend specialist argues PHP is still the most popular server-side language by wide margin, with PHP 8.x improvements addressing performance concerns through JIT compilation and enhanced concurrency handling. While Python excels at ML and real-time analytics, and Java suits massive enterprise systems, PHP offers faster development cycles and adapts well to cloud-native and containerized deployments. Current language popularity indexes rank PHP between 7th and 15th place.

PHP language still relevant, advocate insists

Aside from relevance in webdevelopment it is also a good scripting language for those that prefer a c style scripting language over python

While I haven’t used PHP for decades now, I’ll just leave this here. Let the numbers speak for themselves. And this is from Docker Hub alone. How many installs are there that are not containerazied (e.g. simple site hosting), hmm? 😉
<img src="https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--JHpesMWZ--/f_auto/v1768644958/ugc/content_04d12353-c795-4668-8d2a-3c550a375f54?_a=BAMAMiiu0" alt="image">
This, of course, doesn’t mean 1 billion instances running (hey, Java 👋), but even counting multiple downloads (let’s say a hundred downloads or so) per project, that’s still a lot. Yeah, PHP is still pretty much relevant. So are techs like jQuery. Just because we don’t talk about them like we used to doesn’t mean they don’t power the majority of websites. 🙂

The title is hilarious. How do you really feel about PHP infoworld ;-)