Top Technologies Used By YC Companies (opens in new tab)

- PHP might be the most practical choice for some of these companies. The founder or lead tech might be most proficient in PHP for real-world applications (even if he adores Python or Ruby).

- PHP might be the language that everyone on the team knows so they choose it to keep everyone equally involved in the production of the site.

- The people commenting on HN aren't necessarily people who start companies (truer now than it ever was).

Edit: Also, it might be the case that some of these servers purposely lie about what language is used on the backend to thwart script kiddies.

Almost everyone on this site, including devoted PHP devs, recognizes the fact that PHP isn't exactly an elegant and well-designed language.

The pointless "hate" however only comes from a small group of people for reasons really only known to them. But if you look outside the world of programming languages to the kind of people that loudly proclaim to hate something, I think you'll get a pretty good idea of the kind of people we're talking about.

These are not the majority of users of HN. They just feel safe here, like hooligans feel safe in a stadium filled with supporters of the same team.

This list looks extremely noisy to me in general.

Not to defend the php hate, of course. Just to point out that it's not actually the most popular language, despite the misleading graph.

Bjarne Stroustrup

And second, I put my company's (admittedly not YC, but hey) homepage there just to try and since we're using a hosted Wordpress for the landing page so that business people can change the copy easier, it thought we're using PHP when in reality the app doesn't have a single line in it.

Additionally, Facebook has made PHP scalable with the HipHop compiler and other open source tools, so that's no longer a major reason not to use it.

From what I understand GA isn't showing search keywords now for users that are logged into their Google account (totally frustrating change as more of your users seem to be logged in now). Webmaster tools does kind of show this information but without any of the neat metrics that go along with a GA report.

I've also heard horror stories. There was an article (or possibly just a commenter) on here not too long ago that was describing how their position on the SERPs dropped dramatically just a week after signing up for webmaster tools. That kind of thing sticks with you, even if it's not true (and I do suspect there were other variables involved that he wasn't telling us).

So, it's not all about whether someone is savvy or not. ;)

Edit: Almost forgot! A killer feature of WT that I think no one should do without is that it shows you what pages on the web are linking to your site. I'd forgotten how awesome that is.

1. In some cases the technology choices aren't mutually exclusive, as you point out. A better representation would be a bar chart that tops out at 100%

2. Not all technologies are equally detectable. The ones that are harder get penalized, and those that or impossible to detect are penalized 100%. In categories where this is endemic, the ones that are detectable appear to be dominant when that is hardly certain. Frameworks is probably one of the most egregiously misleading of the bunch.

That being said, very cool that you were able to pull this together - the raw data here is very neat and it would be cool if we could even dive in more and end users could play with it in different charts, etc.

Notice that both that showed up were intrusive payment systems. What I mean by "intrusive" is that they take you away from the site you are shopping on to enter your payment and shipping information on the payment system site. My guess is that this is the only kind of system the reporting site detects, because you can find it by noting the links to the payment system site.

If a site were using a transparent system, where the payment and shipping information are posted back to their own server and they deal with it on their own backend, it probably would not show up.

For instance, if your cart checkout just posts back to your PHP or Ruby code, and that code uses Braintree's PHP or Ruby API to process the payment through Braintree, there is no way the reporting site is going to know that you are using Braintree. Same if you are using Merchant e-Solutions, PayPal's PayFlow Pro, or something similar.

Most advertisers that do display retarget attempt to build segments and suppress ads to buyers/logins from potential new customers. this can be difficult though with cookie deletion and people using multiple devices/browsers.

I agree pie charts are probably the worst way to visualise the statistics. For example, it gives no sense at all of the ubiquity of any technology.

Also the accuracy seems to be lacking. I was surprised by seeing their (automated) claim that only 85% of the sites use CSS. That seems strange since I can't actually remember having seen a site recently that doesn't use CSS on its homepage. Checking some of the unlisted sites confirmed my suspicion; they just failed to detect CSS on those pages.

Finally, these statistics only give insight into what is used on the home page of the given domain. The home page may just be part of a (separate) marketing website, so don't be fooled into thinking these statistics represent the products/services built by these companies.

Disregarding all the problems with these stats, it is indeed interesting to see a comprehensive list like this. I find their list of technology trends [1] even more interesting, though.

[1]: http://trends.builtwith.com/

That said, I too am horrified. Maybe some of the newer ASP.net deployment stuff appears to be plain vanilla FPSE from the outside.