Is PHP Still Relevant? Insights from the Latest TIOBE Rankings

TIOBE recently released its November 2021 programming language ranking.

Since the index began over 20 years ago, PHP has consistently been in the top ten, but it is now struggling at the edge of that group.

According to TIOBE CEO Paul Jansen, "PHP was once a master of web programming, but now faces heavy competition. It is not dead; many small and medium enterprises still rely on it. I expect a gradual decline, but at a slow pace. Ruby and Groovy have each moved up three places this month."

Other notable movements this month include Lua rising from 32nd to 26th, Dart from 40th to 31st, and Kotlin from 38th to 33rd.

TIOBE November Top 20 Programming Languages

In the top ten, Python remains the leader after winning last month, followed by C and Java. Assembly language moved from 10th to 8th, while SQL and PHP slipped to 9th and 10th respectively.

Positions 11‑20 saw fluctuations: Go fell from 12th to 18th; Groovy (15→12), Ruby (16→13), Swift (17→14), Perl (19→16), Delphi/Object Pascal (20→17) rose, while R (14→15), Go, Fortran (18→19), MATLAB (13→20) dropped. Classic Visual Basic stayed at 11th.

TOP 10 Programming Language Trend (2002‑2020)

Ranks 21‑50

Ranks 51‑100 are listed alphabetically due to minimal score differences.

According to the TIOBE index methodology, the ranking is updated monthly and based on the number of skilled engineers, courses, and third‑party vendors, using search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube, and Baidu.

Key Characteristics and Drawbacks of PHP

PHP has become faster, especially with PHP 8’s JIT compiler.

It boasts many high‑quality frameworks, including ThinkPHP, CodeIgniter, Laravel, and Yii. Laravel, for example, provides strong security and clean code practices for web applications.

Approximately 77 million websites worldwide run on PHP, requiring ongoing maintenance.

The language benefits from a massive global community that helps solve technical issues on platforms like Stack Overflow.

Freelancers favor PHP for its ease of learning, allowing non‑technical users to manage back‑end sites, and it powers popular platforms such as WordPress.

However, PHP’s performance lags behind runtimes like Golang or Node.js, and its request‑per‑process architecture can cause inefficiencies.

Despite these drawbacks, PHP remains a viable skill for developers, with continued demand and relevance on the internet for the next decade.