Even if php stopped being used in all new projects today, people are still hiring for cobol projects.
The number of php projects now is orders of magnitude more than cobol in it's heyday.
There are going to be plenty of php jobs for quite some time.
Probably true, but also COBOL usually encodes the business logic, which is much harder to throw away and rewrite from scratch, than any presentation layer written in PHP.
>With 7.3 it seems as though PHP has finally got to a point where it knows who it is and where it's going
I've been reading a similar sentence for each version since 5.6. Is 2020 also gonna be the year of the Linux desktop?
As much as everybody likes to hate on PHP, it powers a lot of services that are used all around the world - and a lot of internal systems.
With 7.3 it seems as though PHP has finally got to a point where it knows who it is and where it's going - don't get me wrong, it's paid my wage for the last 18 years - but it's also made it very easy to shoot myself in the foot.
With frameworks like Laravel and Symfony about now, I can only see it getting stronger.
(Although I'm moving to more Elixir and Phoenix, I still pick PHP for simple projects, or those that I can't use Elixir on - and obviously maintaining and upgrading existing things)