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Language usage on the server side: ASP.NET follows PHP (a lot!)

In what might be considered good news for Microsoft, its ASP.NET web development framework ranks second among server-side programming languages ​​for web projects (although it is not a language programming) in a single classification.

In what might be considered bad news for Microsoft, ASP.NET lags far, far behind the # 1 language, PHP.

Web-tech survey specialist W3Techs tracks such things on its site on pages like “Historical Annual Trends in Server-Side Programming Language Usage Statistics for Websites.” It includes rankings from January 2010 to present. This 13-year graph shows that PHP has always ranked first and ASP.NET has always ranked second. Currently, this is a share of 78.9% for PHP and 8.3% for ASP.NET. But, while the former has remained fairly constant over those 13 years, ASP.NET has fallen steadily from a high of 24.4% in 2010, when PHP grabbed 72.5% of the market. Here is the full table:

Here’s a graph showing how ASP.NET (red line, second from top) has declined over the years, while most other languages ​​have remained more stable over the entire 13-year period (although Ruby has gotten strong lately and seems ready to jump over ASP.NET):

This is just a ranking, of course, and comparing different rankings is usually like comparing apples and oranges, as each has methodologies, terminology, product classification, measurement approaches, etc. For example, as mentioned, ASP.NET is not even a language. Microsoft describes it as “a framework for building web applications and services with .NET and C #.” It is therefore a framework that is part of another framework whose users mainly use C #. Note that W3Techs also lists “static files” and “ColdFusion” as programming languages.

And then there is the argument as to whether PHP is even a “programming” language. At least everyone agrees that it is a “script” language. Beyond these two examples, other variables and biases generally abound in these measures.

So even though W3Techs doesn’t mention C #, several other server-side web development surveys and articles directly compare C # and PHP, while others do not.

Some don’t mention either, like the Backend Developers article on Medium titled “5 Most Scalable Backend Development Languages ​​/ Frameworks in 2021-2022. It lists Node.js, Python, Kotlin, Ruby on Rails, and Java – no mention of PHP or C #.

A recent BairesDev article titled “The 5 Best Languages ​​and Frameworks for Server Side Scripting” includes almost the exact same list, but replaces PHP with Kotlin, ending with a ranking of PHP, Node.js, Python, Ruby, and Java.

As of 2018, the same group of characters appear in an article titled “5 Best Programming Languages ​​to Learn Server-Side Web Development,” where the ranking is Node.js, PHP, Java, Ruby, and Python.

Obviously, all of the above doesn’t even mention ASP.NET, let alone C #. However, when analyzing 13 popular websites, C # shows up, but unsurprisingly only for Microsoft-owned Bing and MSN properties:

However, when not limited to the back end, C # ranks in many web development studies and articles. A vivid example of this is IEEE Spectrum’s great customizable and interactive “Top Programming Languages ​​2021” effort, which allows you to filter the results by choosing language types such as web, business, mobile and embarked. As shown in the graphic below, this web ranking is: Python, Java, JavaScript, C # and Go:

And when measuring web development frameworks – as opposed to programming languages ​​- it’s a much different story for ASP.NET. For example, a recent Career Karma article titled “The Most Popular Web Development Executives in 2021” found that ASP.NET ranks among the top five back-end offers when measured by the number of jobs. on LinkedIn and in Stack Overflow questions. Here’s a poorly formatted table showing the latter, where ASP.NET was in second place behind Node.js:

But if you are using ASP.NET, you are probably using C #. As Microsoft says, “When you use ASP.NET, your core code, such as business logic and data access, is written using C #, F #, or Visual Basic. ”

So, the main takeaways from this little exploration of the use of the server-side web programming language as it relates to readers of Visual Studio Magazine could be listed as:

• PHP, which may or may not be a programming language, is certainly a widely used scripting language in server-side web projects.
• C # is also widely used for web development, but mainly on the server side as part of ASP.NET, which is a fairly popular web development framework but is definitely not a programming language.
• Overall, Node.js, PHP, Java, Ruby, and Python – in one order or another – are generally the best choices for server-side web development programming.

Of course, in recent years, Microsoft has been developing its Blazor offer within the framework of ASP.NET. Through the use of WebAssembly, Blazor allows C # to be used in both its server-side and client-side component where the predominant JavaScript has long reigned at the top. So things can change.