Re:Ask HN: Should I learn PHP in 2017?
by coldtea on Tuesday December 06, 2016 @06:46AM
(#13113901)
>Here in Brazil most small companies still use PHP due to virtual hosting, to deliver to clients which host themselves on shared hosting. VPSes are relatively expensive, unless you host in US.
That's the case all over the world, including in the USA.
>Should I actually learn PHP these days to serve this kind of client, which is the most common client to get small jobs in my country? Or this is crazy and I should just tell them I work with Python?
Go where the clients are. If you want to work in SV, you could forego PHP and learn Node or Rails. Or if you want to work in banking etc, where would mostly be Java, C# etc.
But for those kind of jobs (which can be quite substantial, some of the biggest websites are run on PHP, including Whitehouse.gov, The Wired, and tons of high profile sites), PHP is a good choice, and PHP7 has never been better in language features, ecosystem, libraries, good practices, etc.
To put it another way: Javascript is in not much (if at all) better than PHP as a programming language, and people used to laugh about it to for "serious programming". But since everybody is forced to use it on the browser side, it eventually caught on, and nowadays you have JS snobs looking down on PHP. So those things are mostly based on fashion that actual technical merit.
That's the case all over the world, including in the USA.
>Should I actually learn PHP these days to serve this kind of client, which is the most common client to get small jobs in my country? Or this is crazy and I should just tell them I work with Python?
Go where the clients are. If you want to work in SV, you could forego PHP and learn Node or Rails. Or if you want to work in banking etc, where would mostly be Java, C# etc.
But for those kind of jobs (which can be quite substantial, some of the biggest websites are run on PHP, including Whitehouse.gov, The Wired, and tons of high profile sites), PHP is a good choice, and PHP7 has never been better in language features, ecosystem, libraries, good practices, etc.
To put it another way: Javascript is in not much (if at all) better than PHP as a programming language, and people used to laugh about it to for "serious programming". But since everybody is forced to use it on the browser side, it eventually caught on, and nowadays you have JS snobs looking down on PHP. So those things are mostly based on fashion that actual technical merit.