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> I don't know any young people who learn it anymore, and I haven't met a startup building their product in PHP in many years. That's a poor metric for whether

> I don't know any young people who learn it anymore, and I haven't met a startup building their product in PHP in many years. That's a poor metric for whether you should use it though, as both groups tend towards over-focusing on new "cool" tech stacks. I bet Vue would come up as the top framework amongst these groups but it is certainly not yet battle-tested.

smt88 8y ago
It's not the only metric, but it matters. It has a huge effect on who you can hire and who wants to work for you. Smart people are often attracted to learning new stacks.
scarface74 8y ago
It matters being on the other side for one of the reason the article cited -PHP programmers are more plentiful and cheaper than Java programmers. I worked for a company that had a legacy product that was written in PHP and started hiring like crazy over the next year to bring an adjacent product to market in .Net. But by year two, it was obvious that the new product was something that the market didn’t want but they were getting more opportunities on the legacy PHP side. Within 6 months after they abandoned the .Net product and started focusing on the PHP product, every single developer -14 in all left - starting with me. I called recruiters the same day that they announced they were focusing on PHP and left within a month. The only reason it took 6 months was that some were close to thier three year vesting period and one or two others were closing on a house. None of us were going to waste our time doing PHP. We knew there was no money in being a “PHP Developer”. Looking at LinkedIn, none of us mentioned that we ever touched PHP, we didn’t want recruiters wasting our time.
- mywittyname 8y ago
  > We knew there was no money in being a “PHP Developer”. The hate on PHP is real, but I think it's completely unjustified. I do a lot of work in PHP because is a great tool for anything web or Linux related. I can get code that works out the door quickly and it will happily run for years without issue. I think the biggest issue with PHP is that it made software development much more accessible. I've worked on a few projects over the years that were started by some domain expert with no experience in programming. They are able to cobble a workable product together by reading a few chapters of a web development book.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    The hate on PHP is real, but I think it's completely unjustified. I do a lot of work in PHP because is a great tool for anything web or Linux related. I can get code that works out the door quickly and it will happily run for years without issue. The issue is not "hating" on the technical merits of PHP. The issue is going where the money is. PHP developers don't make nearly as much as C#/Java/NodeJS developers.
    - beaconstudios 8y ago
      as an ex-PHP and current React/Node developer, I think that's because the tech market is pretty irrational. I could get a lot more done in PHP than I can in Node, and laravel blade templates are much harder to get wrong than your average react app that didn't need to be an SPA in the first place.
fgonzag 8y ago
Python, Java, and C# are not new cool tech stacks yet they are still widely used in greenfield projects. They've also evolved a lot (new Java frameworks are quite decent, asp.net has also gotten a lot better from the aspx days)

smt88 8y ago

It's not the only metric, but it matters. It has a huge effect on who you can hire and who wants to work for you. Smart people are often attracted to learning new stacks.

scarface74 8y ago

It matters being on the other side for one of the reason the article cited -PHP programmers are more plentiful and cheaper than Java programmers. I worked for a company that had a legacy product that was written in PHP and started hiring like crazy over the next year to bring an adjacent product to market in .Net. But by year two, it was obvious that the new product was something that the market didn’t want but they were getting more opportunities on the legacy PHP side. Within 6 months after they abandoned the .Net product and started focusing on the PHP product, every single developer -14 in all left - starting with me. I called recruiters the same day that they announced they were focusing on PHP and left within a month. The only reason it took 6 months was that some were close to thier three year vesting period and one or two others were closing on a house. None of us were going to waste our time doing PHP. We knew there was no money in being a “PHP Developer”. Looking at LinkedIn, none of us mentioned that we ever touched PHP, we didn’t want recruiters wasting our time.

mywittyname 8y ago
> We knew there was no money in being a “PHP Developer”. The hate on PHP is real, but I think it's completely unjustified. I do a lot of work in PHP because is a great tool for anything web or Linux related. I can get code that works out the door quickly and it will happily run for years without issue. I think the biggest issue with PHP is that it made software development much more accessible. I've worked on a few projects over the years that were started by some domain expert with no experience in programming. They are able to cobble a workable product together by reading a few chapters of a web development book.
- scarface74 8y ago
  The hate on PHP is real, but I think it's completely unjustified. I do a lot of work in PHP because is a great tool for anything web or Linux related. I can get code that works out the door quickly and it will happily run for years without issue. The issue is not "hating" on the technical merits of PHP. The issue is going where the money is. PHP developers don't make nearly as much as C#/Java/NodeJS developers.
  - beaconstudios 8y ago
    as an ex-PHP and current React/Node developer, I think that's because the tech market is pretty irrational. I could get a lot more done in PHP than I can in Node, and laravel blade templates are much harder to get wrong than your average react app that didn't need to be an SPA in the first place.

fgonzag 8y ago

Python, Java, and C# are not new cool tech stacks yet they are still widely used in greenfield projects. They've also evolved a lot (new Java frameworks are quite decent, asp.net has also gotten a lot better from the aspx days)