I probably won't bother with PHP, but it can't hurt to keep my idea of what it's like up to date.
It's only technology, no need to be fanatical about it.
Most people don't actually know that php powers such a large portion of the internet, because globally there's waning interest in php (http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/PHP.ht...) and it's generally dreaded by developers (http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2015#tech...).
In all seriousness, why would you get into php at this point?
Do you want to go and work for Wordpress.com? (I mean, heck, they're building node sites now (https://developer.wordpress.com/2015/11/23/the-story-behind-...).
Are there really that many php jobs floating around?
I'm certainly not seeing it.
There are a tonne of 1-click-wordpress-for-$10 companies out there, making $10 websites using it... sure, and certainly, plenty of people use it as a blog; but is there really a professional path for a php developer?
There's no where near the interest in it that there is in engineers using say, java or C#, or heck, even javascript.
I mean, I'm totally down with looking up composer and php classes if you're curious to see what 'modern' php is like, but I certainly couldn't come up with a good reason to do it other than curiosity.
It's just like "alright that's fine". Maybe there's so many of them because my high falutin snobby peers are simply too good for dirty php. Who knows?
Curiosity is a perfectly good reason to do things, isn't it?
PHP is a poorly written language. From comparisons to namespaces to other gotchas, it's just pigs guts. From the ground up, it's a badly designed language. Look up "Fractal of bad design" for a better understanding of why.
I simply don't like to call something that millions of programmers work with "pigs guts" if I haven't actually looked at it for about a decade.
Plus, who cares if anyone learns Cobol? If they want to, there is not reason to stop them.
You can see how your opinions come off as ludicrous ?
PHP has no place in modern development.
If you've truly taken the time to understand modern PHP and want to discuss its weaknesses, by all means proceed. Otherwise bashing the professional work of your peers is simply rude.
Get over your elitest attitude. PHP is a fine language and has it's warrants of use.
Speaking of, 2 days ago marked a year since I last used PHP.
Because some people just prefer it. They know its warts and have learned to work around it. For me it is a much easier prototyping tool. The crazy number of built in functions and libraries out there makes it so. Eg: Want to turn on and off an IoT device at sunrise and sunset? Well for other languages you have to go find some library or depend on an external service but no not for PHP. For PHP there is freaking built in date_sunrise and date_sunset functions! [1]
If you know how to program but is bad at sysops PHP might be the choice for you since you can just install one of the many Lamp packages and used managed hosting.
But if you can set up a decent webserver on a VPS you're probably better with something else.
