All online surveys (or any survey) should be taken with a grain of salt. That said I find it interesting that the results of the Zend survey on PHP usage so accurately reflect my own ideas regarding PHP; namely that its incredibly easy to learn, and useful for rapidly throwing together an application, but generally unsuited for large applications, or large teams.

Easy to Learn

Nearly 90% of respondents choose PHP because it was easy to learn, very few know any other programming language (other then Javascript), with the majority of PHP developers saying they’ve been developing for 2-5 years. ### Small Teams

More interestingly the nearly 50% of PHP developers are working on teams of 2-5 people, with 30% working by themselves, and barely a fraction on teams larger then 10. ### Simple Apps

The majority of projects (26%) are 1000-5000 lines long (Magpie, a simple tool clocks in around 4000 lines for reference) with only a handful of apps breaking the 20,000 lines that would seem necessary to build an app of any complexity. This is particularly telling given the fact that PHP encourages you to mix your presentation layer in with your code, which should drive total line counts up. ### Recap

So the majority of PHP applications are short, and simple, written by small teams with just a few years of experience as programmers.
I think it’s great that PHP came along to fill what was obviously a niche that desperately needed filling, but it is nice to have one’s prejudices confirmed.