blackhorse wrote:structural programming?
You mean "procedural" programming.
ASP.NET is great if you're already a Microsoft-based outfit and want to integrate your web site with the rest of the business IT (and why wouldn't you?), but for standalone sites hauling that entire framework about (ASP.NET basically relies on having the whole .NET framework behind it - 5,000-odd classes in the .NET core alone) is usually overkill.
Most sites running on PHP have been written by people with no training in software design (often not even self-directed training) so I suspect that a majority of PHP sites would be written in procedural fashion and would be neither neither OO nor structured, just a long slew of statements one following the other.
PHP is not primarily an object-oriented programming language: you don't need to create an entire class just to to "Hello, World", and without using any OO it's still fully Turing-complete. But object orientation is a nice-to-have, and when things get large it becomes vital that some sort of compartmentalisation of responsibilities is established and maintained or you just end up with a big ball of mud (which is not to say you can't end up with a big ball of mud in any paradigm).
(It's also nice to have functional programming; which PHP's support for this to date has been pretty ropy, but has been sharpened up to the point of actually being useful in 5.3.)
So to a large extent, it's academic. Consider the number of questions that get posted here about "how do I do Foo with Bar" when Foo and Bar are completely independent concepts that don't have any reason to be together in the same question in the first place (select boxes and database queries, for example). The best any programming paradigm can do is accurately reflect the programmer's mental model of what's going on. If they don't have one, or it's a mental model of a big ball of mud, then that's what they'll write whatever paradigm they use.
