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.
There's plenty of php work. I don't have that language on my resume, I don't seek such jobs, but there are just sooo many of them that 5 of my previous 7 years of employment with 4 firms, probably 10 contracts --- all PHP.
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?
You don't have to work for wordpress.com, though. For example, I do some PHP coding for a media company, which also happens to use Wordpress - WP with redis caching can run a big site also. So yes, there is still php work floating around. Incidentally, their internal tools (content auditing, SEO, ...) is also being done in PHP...
Not arguing, just saying that for example London continuously offers lots of good php contract opportunities. Day rates are slightly less compared to some other tech (mostly tech used in finance), but still decent. It is still very popular in media, e-commerce, publishing, with digital agencies and in various other fields.
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.
The numbers tell a different story. Wordpress powers 25% of the entire web. That is a quarter of the entire internet. It's pretty much your opinion vs the entire internet.
You can see how your opinions come off as ludicrous ?
Who cares about the coding language when the market is telling you otherwise? Isn't that the very essence of starting a startup, YCombinator, the whole Silicon Valley mantra? Listen to your customers.
The customers are telling you PHP is preferred to other languages and is here to stay as evidenced by 25% of the web using a single PHP application as the backend.
I won't argue that the language makes the framework popular. But if Wordpress serves 25% of the entire web, Facebook serves 1/7th of the entire world population every single day, and 500M people visit Wikipedia a month, clearly something about PHP works. Perhaps it attracts a certain kind of personality that gets things done, or perhaps its flexibility is what makes it successful, but to call the most influential programming language of this generation pig guts is willful ignorance.
Or perhaps it was easy to learn for novices, or easy to deploy...
This is a straw man. Citing 2 popular web sites and 1 application doesn't mean PHP is a well designed language. You could just as well have picked 2 other web sites written in Java to argue that PHP is rubbish.
I wouldn't even call it influential, unless language developers have been inspired about how not to design a language. Popular, yes, but not influential. I don't see anything from it being incorporated into other languages. It generally seems to have been playing catch up in terms of features, in a similar way to javascript (where there it's less about catch-up and more about breaking out of the browser & supporting OO).
You're not only wrong, you're extremely rude. How many professional PHP developers do you estimate are in the world currently? "no place" indeed.
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.
As far as I understand, most/all new development is done in Hack.
Granted, a lot of Hack features are starting to make their way into PHP (much like how exciting new TypeScript features are making their way into ES6 and above), but focus has been shifted to Hack.
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.