[LRUG] Language usage stats

[Patrick Gleeson]

It's almost all Shopify. https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-shopify

On Fri, 6 Mar 2026, 01:21 Roland Swingler via Chat, <chat at lists.lrug.org>
wrote:

> 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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