Hello all. I’d like to add a few words regarding the 10 percent. Let’s assume there really are 10% of developers in PHP who use Async. We can replace this with some number X. What’s important is how exactly these percentages are calculated.
For example, if this X percent is calculated based on the total number of projects, that’s one thing. Suppose PHP is used in 1,000 projects. Out of those, 800 projects are fairly simple, 150 are medium-sized, and 50 are complex. Most likely, async would be used in 200 projects, not in all 800. So if there truly are X% of developers using it, then it turns out this is actually a very large percentage of developers working on medium and complex projects. Do you see the difference? The difference is that medium and complex projects bring PHP developers more money. This means that if the PHP language and its ecosystem cannot compete with Go or Python, then PHP developers earn less because they’re not participating in the projects that generate that money. Even if only 5% of developers use synchronous PHP, that can still be a lot when you recalculate it. And it is precisely the segment of developers working on medium- and high-complexity tasks that pushes the language forward. Therefore, losing 10%, or 5%, or even 2% may actually cost much more for the language’s progress than it seems. Skype and Nokia were once great too, and they also decided not to develop their “1%.”
