EVE Technology Lab

I would suggest that if that 80% is true for professional software some percentage of those, perhaps a large percentage are caught up in a natural human pathological phenomena demonstrated in the

The Dollar Auction

It demonstrates things like:

1. addictive tendencies
2. a confusing boundary between rational and irrational choices.
3. vested costs in time/money aggravates the irrational choices.
4. intense aggressive competition is typically the result.

This happens in software engineering all the time. It is why prototypes end up actual product. Its why us (software engineers) will spend hours defending a module we have written with some weakness, providing endless workaround arguments, providing endless extensions around a weak foundation because there is just too much already vested in the current state of things. Cutting one's losses, wiping the design board clean and starting over seems (irrationally in the big picture) to not be an option.

I would suggest a large majority of the 20% (of professional software) are new within the last 5 years (remember the 5 year legacy rule) were not willing to start bidding at 5 dollars for that 1 dollar bill!

I wonder how many of those 80% constantly lose sleep at night trying to decide if and how they might cut their losses, but the cost is so much, they double down in their commitment.

I know personally of the very heated meetings over this exact concept as a constant through out my career.

Yeah I know sites like wikipedia, 95% of all blogging site, most E-com sites they don't have a clue how to make a web site I'm sure
https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/programming_language/all

Now you do have sites like Facebook, Google, etc that have move part of they're ops away from PHP but they moved to compiled code to get max performance on critical stuff but every then like Facebook developed JIT and compiled version of PHP to do what they needed so they didn't totally go away even then.

Java continues to stay right about same year to year between 2-3% and for all the talk about the new languages that are suppose to be better they all have less than 1% of all sites and even lose out to .NET. What I find interesting is if you look at % of Windows servers which is at 33% they lose about half of them to other server side languages and most but not all of that is also PHP. CCP here are big Windows and Python fans but I'll bet if they did a complete survey of all their outward facing sites a noticeable % use PHP as well. Simple fact is it gets the job done and has done nothing but got better with time.