Meh, at this point it doesn't matter. There's so much (bad) php code out there that needs to be maintained, any person who learns to write good php has a job fo

Meh, at this point it doesn't matter. There's so much (bad) php code out there that needs to be maintained, any person who learns to write good php has a job for life. But I've always said that PHP's popularity was due to its availability on free hosting providers. However nowadays, you can get free hosting for a plethora of languages. So more competition, and also there are so many more languages that are competing for the backend nowadays.