PHP is worst career choice

> "NO, you will still do basic things in PHP, fill form, submit, store, display or do a boring API"

The "basics things" power a lot of projects in today's tech world. E.g. Twitter is about filling a tweet form, submit, store the tweet and display tweets. It also provides a boring API.

Not every company sends humans into space.

> Not used in bigger projects or companies

I don't agree with this statement. I can name a lot of companies that use PHP. Yelp, Facebook (HHVM now), Wikipedia, WordPress. Those are huge projects and companies.

> Not used in bigger projects or companies

Uhhh Facebook, Wikipedia, Baidu, Flickr, iStockPhoto, Tumblr, and Mailchimp?

I was hoping for an intelligible article about how despite PHP being a nice language these days, most of the work regarding it is old code from before best practices were applied, or cleaning up after cheap, awful programmers... Alas, that was not the case.

Disagree. Indian here, working at pure PHP projects at Razorpay.

>1. Performance

HHVM, PHP 7

>2. Not moving upto pace to match the other languages

PHP 7

>3. Undervalued language in the industry >4. Not used in bigger projects or companies

Etsy, Facebook, Wordpress, Wikipedia.

>5. Poor pay scales

This is where it gets interesting. To get better salaries in PHP, you need to be working at better places. Good companies are willing to pay good money for good php developers. It's just harder to find because of the large number of beginner PHP devs in the market.

>6. Third party tools needed to scale it up

True for Ruby, Python, and most other web languages.

Religious argument. Anyone who says something like this doesn't have very deep dev experience under their belt.

No matter what language you use core concepts are incredibly similar.

Many huge projects use php.

Laravel is a framework just as beautiful as ruby.

Disagree. I work at perk.com and we use PHP for all our products/APIs and we serve millions of request per day without any problems. BTW, I've talked to PHP Developers in China and they get paid lesser than what we pay our developers in India.

> Any Chinese citizen or anyone who is not an Indian

Do you have data to suggest there are better career opportunities for PHP devs in China, and much bleaker prospects for devs in India? Or is this based solely on ethnicity without regard for location? Such a statment without data to support your view comes across as biased, potentially even elitist.

If it can get the job done. It ain't bad. Or you can shout at end user: "hey look! Wikipedia, Yelp, Facebook uses PHP to build their company!" See, nobody cares. Well, maybe some developers do care.

PHP's performance isn't bad. It's the frameworks written by people with Java enterprise envy.

> "Performance"

HHVM, HippyVM, PHP 7 if you're starting a new project; opcode caching

Geez that's an unfortunate url, and the article's pretty half-baked too.

I disagree.

There's a million of folks having a nice career writing commercial plugins or creating custom sites with WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, OpenCart to name a few.

Haven't seen any large publishing platform in Go but I might be wrong of course.

PHP in terms of the language syntax and at least a broad familiarity with the most used libs etc?

That's not a career choice, that's just something you can do as a web developer, like HTML and basic CSS.

Question is where you go from there. Another language/stack? Domain knowledge? Projects guy? etc etc