On Thu, Aug 8, 2019 at 3:17 PM Brent <brendt@stitcher.io> wrote:
> I asked similar questions on Twitter, where Zeev replied the following:
> https://mobile.twitter.com/zeevs/status/1158688885658046464
I want to add a bit of color to this tweet:
- Estimated # of developers using PHP is at around 10M. This is based on
some extrapolation from an EDS report from ~8 years ago that estimated that
number at >6M, and growth rates we've seen beforehand.
- Anecdotally, I've seen it used many times in non-distributable code over
the years - a lot more frequently than once per 100 users.
- Even if just 1% of the userbase uses short tags, that's ~100K. We can
call this one a guess, but I'd say it's an educated guess that there's well
above 1% of the PHP userbase that uses short tags.
It feels like much of the counter arguments are based on guesses without
> any real data to point to.
I wouldn't say they're guesses, but extrapolations - for instance, the fact
I'm aware of many PHP frameworks and apps, and am not aware of any single
one that allows short tags - makes me feel fairly comfortable to make the
statement that "virtually all frameworks and apps designed for public
consumption disallow short tags". I can't preclude the possibility that
the fact that all of the apps and frameworks I'm aware of don't allow short
tags is a remarkable coincidence - or that there are countless ones I'm not
aware of that do allow short tags - but I think that my theory is a lot
more plausible.
Zeev