Is Php Declining? Jetbrains Says Yes. And No

JetBrains has released its State of the Developer Ecosystem survey, with more than 24,500 responses, revealing AI’s impact on developer tools and programming language trends – including the claim that PHP and Ruby are in “long term decline.”

This annual survey is one of the largest targeting developers, but also one of the hardest to parse due to its complex methodology.

Responses are weighted to remove bias toward users of JetBrains products, regional distribution, and other factors. Still, it consistently shows higher usage of JetBrains IDEs – as well as Java and Kotlin – than other surveys like Stack Overflow’s. The core JetBrains IDE platform is largely coded in Java and Kotlin, so this is unsurprising. The company acknowledges that “some bias is likely present” in the survey as JetBrains users are more likely to respond. 

The survey results are presented as a weighted summary, or can be downloaded as raw data, where many more results are shown.

Most developers regard AI in coding as inescapable, the survey reports. 68 percent expect that AI proficiency (whatever that means) “will become a job requirement.” 85 percent use AI coding tools, with ChatGPT the most popular (41 percent), but less so than in 2024 (49 percent). There is also a notable increase in the perceived benefit: in 2024 only 9 percent of devs using AI reckoned to save eight hours or more a week because of it, while in 2025, 19 percent make the same claim.

Despite those claims, only 44 percent of developers state that AI is fully or partially adopted in their workflows, with the rest regarding it as in a pilot or exploratory stage, or not used at all (9 percent). Nearly a quarter (23 percent) of developers worry about low quality generated code.

Looking at the raw unweighted data, it is notable that usage of Cursor, an AI IDE based on the same core as Visual Studio Code (VS Code), has leapt from just 135 in 2024 to more than 2,300 in 2025. As a company whose main business is in IDEs, the AI wave is both a threat and an opportunity for JetBrains. Some, including agile programming and test-driven development pioneer Kent Beck, believe software development is moving “beyond the IDE”; he said recently (though in a post sponsored by Ona, formerly Gitpod), that with agentic coding “we’re spending most of our time on a task the IDE barely acknowledges exists” and makes the case for new kinds of tools.

It is also obvious that hooking up developer tools to AI services is a commercial opportunity – if the vendor gets its sums right. Since May 2024, JetBrains has been busy trying to attract more IDE users by making many of its products free for non-commercial use, now including CLion, DataGrip, Rider, RubyMine, RustRover and WebStorm.

Commercial licenses remain pricey, but one can see the logic of getting more IDEs out there in the hope of selling devs on AI services. JetBrains also said recently that it is discontinuing its cloud coding environment CodeCanvas in favor of a future “AI-first, cloud-native product.”

Programming language trends according to the annual JetBrains developer survey

The JetBrains survey looks at programming language trends too, noting the dramatic rise of TypeScript over the last five years, and declaring that “PHP, Ruby and Objective-C are in long-term decline.”

While few would dispute the findings on Objective-C, with Apple pushing devs toward Swift, the PHP and Ruby assessment may have ruffled feathers: shortly after publication, JetBrains posted that “PHP remains a stable, professional, and evolving ecosystem.” ®

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