ASP.NET follows PHP (a lot!) – Visual Studio Magazine

New
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 ââfor 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 ââhave 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 â5 Most Scalable Backend Development Languages ââ/ 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 ââand 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 â5 Best Programming Languages ââto Learn Server-Side Web Development,â 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 ââ2021” 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 ââ- 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, âWhen 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.
About the Author
David Ramel is editor and writer for Converge360.