I think the question is why should you bother with PHP at all? It had its time in the history of the web but that time has passed, long, long ago.
I probably won't bother with PHP, but it can't hurt to keep my idea of what it's like up to date.
It's only technology, no need to be fanatical about it.
Most people don't actually know that php powers such a large portion of the internet, because globally there's waning interest in php (http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/PHP.ht...) and it's generally dreaded by developers (http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2015#tech...).
In all seriousness, why would you get into php at this point?
Do you want to go and work for Wordpress.com? (I mean, heck, they're building node sites now (https://developer.wordpress.com/2015/11/23/the-story-behind-...).
Are there really that many php jobs floating around?
I'm certainly not seeing it.
There are a tonne of 1-click-wordpress-for-$10 companies out there, making $10 websites using it... sure, and certainly, plenty of people use it as a blog; but is there really a professional path for a php developer?
There's no where near the interest in it that there is in engineers using say, java or C#, or heck, even javascript.
I mean, I'm totally down with looking up composer and php classes if you're curious to see what 'modern' php is like, but I certainly couldn't come up with a good reason to do it other than curiosity.
Curiosity is a perfectly good reason to do things, isn't it?
It's just like "alright that's fine". Maybe there's so many of them because my high falutin snobby peers are simply too good for dirty php. Who knows?
...but to be fair, international sites may not reflect local conditions in your particular area.
In mine, I see virtually no php related jobs.
Still, stats show it as roughly 1/5 as 'in demand' as C# or java, generally.
PHP has no place in modern development.
Get over your elitest attitude. PHP is a fine language and has it's warrants of use.
Speaking of, 2 days ago marked a year since I last used PHP.
As far as I understand, most/all new development is done in Hack.
Granted, a lot of Hack features are starting to make their way into PHP (much like how exciting new TypeScript features are making their way into ES6 and above), but focus has been shifted to Hack.
Hack is basically the TypeScript of PHP. Regular PHP works fine on Hack, but you can start incorporating Hack things into your PHP.
If you want to go that route, then my site is actually powered by Babel and not JavaScript.
The frontend is "PHP", but with a replacement engine, a replacement language, and a replacement standard library...
Having written a bunch of facebook-style Hack and wordpress-style PHP, I would personally consider them about as similar as C++ and Java.
If you've truly taken the time to understand modern PHP and want to discuss its weaknesses, by all means proceed. Otherwise bashing the professional work of your peers is simply rude.
PHP is a poorly written language. From comparisons to namespaces to other gotchas, it's just pigs guts. From the ground up, it's a badly designed language. Look up "Fractal of bad design" for a better understanding of why.
Plus, who cares if anyone learns Cobol? If they want to, there is not reason to stop them.
I simply don't like to call something that millions of programmers work with "pigs guts" if I haven't actually looked at it for about a decade.
You can see how your opinions come off as ludicrous ?
The customers are telling you PHP is preferred to other languages and is here to stay as evidenced by 25% of the web using a single PHP application as the backend.
This is a straw man. Citing 2 popular web sites and 1 application doesn't mean PHP is a well designed language. You could just as well have picked 2 other web sites written in Java to argue that PHP is rubbish.
I wouldn't even call it influential, unless language developers have been inspired about how not to design a language. Popular, yes, but not influential. I don't see anything from it being incorporated into other languages. It generally seems to have been playing catch up in terms of features, in a similar way to javascript (where there it's less about catch-up and more about breaking out of the browser & supporting OO).
Because some people just prefer it. They know its warts and have learned to work around it. For me it is a much easier prototyping tool. The crazy number of built in functions and libraries out there makes it so. Eg: Want to turn on and off an IoT device at sunrise and sunset? Well for other languages you have to go find some library or depend on an external service but no not for PHP. For PHP there is freaking built in date_sunrise and date_sunset functions! [1]
If you know how to program but is bad at sysops PHP might be the choice for you since you can just install one of the many Lamp packages and used managed hosting.
But if you can set up a decent webserver on a VPS you're probably better with something else.