Technology popularity and longevity don’t always walk hand in hand.
We often look for successors to legacy technologies, hoping that newer solutions will automatically displace those from the 1970s. Meanwhile, the C language, created by Dennis Ritchie, remains the ultimate foundational system software after more than 50 years, powering almost every server on Earth. Even a strong contender like Rust hasn’t managed to dethrone it.
Right about now, some smart-aleck will ask: “If C is so great, why don’t we use it for everything?”. Fair point, but the answer is simple-because we don’t need to. C is the lingua franca for hardware communication and is perfectly suited for managing the deepest basements of the operating system. Over the years, languages and tools were created to abstract and speed up coding for specific purposes and platforms-yet C remained the foundation they all run on.
Web backend development can be done in many technologies, and their undisputed leader is PHP. Although its funeral has been announced multiple times, it’s doing great-powering 7 out of 10 websites today, with the other three most popular being Ruby, JavaScript, and Java. Does that list sound like a rehashed menu from a decade ago? Exactly-nobody rewrites entire applications on a whim or switches technologies every few months, or even years!
