[LRUG] Language usage stats

[Roland Swingler]

You have to get 2 clicks deep to get to: https://w3techs.com/disclaimer

I don't really do web stuff any longer so I'm ignorant, but some
initial questions I'd ask about bias in this are:

* does this just measure how easily detectable a website's backend
technology is? i.e. I imagine it is pretty easy to determine whether a
website is built on wordpress or not, but that might not be true for
other stacks, especially if no "user interaction" is allowed. I'd
imagine you can tell a fair amount from whatever gets used to track
sessions via headers/cookies or similar - but do those get set if you
just go to homepage.com?
* Does the lack of javascript execution (it is unclear if they
download the javascript and look at it, or just download the html)
also skew this? Does it skew it both in terms of technology, but also
timeframe (i.e. newer sites might use more javascript than something
that has been online for 20 years and also might use different
technologies)?
* They don't make any claims about how they match to technologies or
what they do if they can't. Do they read millions of websites, and
discard 90% of them because they can't meaningfully tell? The absence
of that information bothers me - for this to be useful you need to
publish that too (maybe they do, and I've missed it).
* this is a raw count, which seems like a valid metric, but is it a
useful metric? It depends why you would want this information. The
stats for any website for an entity that has more than 1 person
working on it might differ dramatically.

Also, 0.2% cold fusion developers, rock on!

R

On Thu, Mar 5, 2026 at 5:49 PM Max Williams via Chat
<chat at lists.lrug.org> wrote:
>
> I guess there are a bunch of sites that still have "If they have Flash do this, if not do that" code.  The Flash block never runs any more but i guess qualifies the site as "using Flash"
>
> On Thu, Mar 5, 2026 at 4:23 PM Chong-Yee Khoo via Chat <chat at lists.lrug.org> wrote:
>>
>> Shockingly, the associated page for “client-side programming languages for websites” shows that Flash is still being used for 2.5% of websites!
>>
>> https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/client_side_language
>>
>> On 5 Mar 2026, at 20:54, Joseph Haig via Chat <chat at lists.lrug.org> wrote:
>>
>> Perhaps this is old news to most people but I found this interesting.
>>
>> I looked up the back-end language stats for websites after hearing someone ask who uses PHP anymore. I remember seeing some years ago that half the web runs on PHP and I see that it is now well above that:
>>
>> * https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/programming_language
>>
>> I suppose this isn't a surprise, thanks to Wordpress, Drupal and others. What I did find surprising is that Ruby is still top of "the rest" (albeit a long way behind PHP) and it is apparently growing (albeit slowly). I honestly thought that Node and Python would be higher.
>>
>> So clearly what we need is a viable Wordpress alternative written Ruby so that we can narrow the gap!
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Joe
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