I am not sure I would start a side project in PHP, but I will disagree that the other languages have better tools or libraries. For doing your job most of the t

I am not sure I would start a side project in PHP, but I will disagree that the other languages have better tools or libraries. For doing your job most of the time the language is not the issue, real work in my case is mostly related to thinking at teh problem, researching and implementing solutions, PHP allows me to write solutions and when the right tool for the job is a CLI tool (like ffmpeg or ghostscript) I can use it from PHP, if a bash script can dsolve a problem I write the solution in bash and use it from PHP, and I had a problem where Python was pefect, we made the Python solution and integrated the mainPHp app with it. A good developer will not be an extremist fanboy for a language or framework, otherwise he will reinvent stuff in his cool tech because he does not want to learn. But I agree for someone new start with JavaScript, but if someone will pay you to work with PHP take the money, learn modern PHP, use a good IDE and you will be happy.