The folks over at Kinsta.com have put together some end of the year usage statistics for PHP across the web trying to answer the "is PHP dead?" question.

You’ve probably heard about how the new WordPress Gutenberg editor brings block-based editing to WordPress.

There is a change going on behind the scenes that casual users might not notice, that Gutenberg blocks are made using JavaScript (React, JSX, and ES6), not PHP. That change, along with other shifts in web development, might have you wondering, “is PHP dead?”.

People have been calling for the death of PHP for years now (you can find “Is PHP Dead?” posts as far back as 2011). And yet, PHP still persists… In this post, we’ll dig into the data and show how PHP isn’t close to being dead (even if you really wish it were).

The article talks about how, despite PHP not being the "most modern programming language", it's still in use by almost 80% of the websites on the internet (8 out of 10 sites). While the number is declining slightly, it's still large chunk of the web based on the reporting from the X-Powered-By header. They also point out that PHP is faster and better than ever with new, impressive features being added constantly and new versions being regularly released.

They also note that it's easy to find PHP developers (with actual experience) and, while you don't have to like PHP, it's definitely far from being dead.