Here’s something to think about: You and some buddies start a startup whose product is a complicated piece of medical software that uses Tensorflow’s inference but most of it is written in Go. Cool stuff, you’d never do that in PHP.

You’re getting ready to launch, and you’re going to need a marketing site and a site with documentation and help articles for users. Do you write that site in Go?

Hell no. You hire someone cheaper whose skillset isn’t systems programming or ML, and they spit out a templated site in a weekend that looks sleek and makes a good impression, and when you need more content you tell them and they turn it around in an hour, and you spend your time on the Go stuff.

And that market, the market for Good Enough sites that front Really Good products and are fast to work with: that’s a great market for a lot of people who want to sling some code, get things done, clock out at 5 and spend time with their kids in a nice house in the suburbs. That’s why for people who want that kind of life, I recommend learning some PHP (or rather, learning the super-common frameworks that use PHP).