Language Popularity ASP vs. PHP

Matt and I werediscussing the flexibility of PHP. I commented that I keep hearing everyone saying ASP/ASP.net is the best of the best for web development, but judging by the fruits of the internet I would say PHP is more popular and more powerful. I realize that judging its power based on popularity isn't accurate, but I think having such a large repository of available projects to leverage as well as sites dedicated to the language is a huge strength of a language.

Beyond an estimate based on observation, you can judge a language's popularity in three ways.

1. TIOBE Programming Community Index. Unfortunately it doesn't include ASP/ASP.net since it does not consider it an actual language. It does include PHP, and rates it quite highly at #5 (In other news, Delphi moved up to #9 in December!)
2. Google Fight, which compares the Google results of two search terms. It puts PHP as the winner with 2.7 million results vs. ASP with 1.7 million results.
3. Google Code Search, which is the latest in a long line of code search engines. It has 567,000 PHP code samples and only 400 ASP code samples.

TIOBE does a really good job in tracking language popularity. It would be interesting to see how they would rate ASP/ASP.net in comparison to PHP, but I suspect it would put PHP very high on the list. The final indicator of the value of a language is asking people who know both PHP and ASP/ASP.net. They all favor PHP over ASP/ASP.net.

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