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Comment by rbchv | Hacker News Reader

It would be interesting to compare PHP's growth with Ruby and Python.

For a starting developer, does it still make more sense to learn PHP?

There is an absolute glut of PHP positions right now, for both inexperienced and highly experienced developers.

You'll have to be extra-diligent about making sure the sources you're learning from aren't full of security holes, however.

Security holes, or just bad practices in general. My biggest gripe with PHP is that every CMS, framework, custom built site uses a different style, some echo HTML some even output HTML in the middle of a class definition etc. I remember reading popular Joomla! extension that counted the number of elements in a one dimensional array with a for loop.

Drupal, Joomla or Wordpress are not examples of quality PHP products. They are extremely popular because they work, not because of their quality.

If you want to see quality, look to the new generation PHP frameworks: Zend Framework 2, Symfony2, for example.

It's an interesting definition of "quality" that doesn't include "the product works".

I didn't say it wouldn't include. A Ford Fiesta "works", but is not quality.

Right, I think if you want to work professionally as a developer you can certainly find one maintaining PHP code.

However, newer projects and startups are moving towards Python and Rails so if your goal is to be in that game, learn one of those.

Spreading FUD.

There's an immeasurable amount of new work to be done in PHP. You have absolutely no numbers to back up your statement.

Actually that's why I asked initially. You hear a lot about Python/Ruby these days, but I'm wondering if there is any data in the regards.

They are just the language of the year, this year it will probably be all about go and node.js and maybe next year it will be about Steve's Language and ASP.

Moral of the story is, it's just whats in season this year. Some people will argue better languages, but really there are problems with all of them.

You are right. The parent comment is probably just wishing that the world is moving forward.

Yep, get ready for the BASIC revolution.

Heh. Go figure. I make my money with PHP.

If you want to do freelance work, learning PHP (or ASP) is mandatory. Sure, Ruby is great, but you'll keep stumbling on :

"our shared host is PHP only, we don't want to change for another" "we want wordpress" "our computer guys know a little PHP, we need PHP" "what the fuck is Ruby ?"

So you'll try to educate your client, to explain why Ruby us great. But you'll fail, because most clients don't give a shit and, for their very basic needs, PHP is as good as ruby.

To be fair, the big problem is that EVERY language can go through the hands of the incompetent.

I think it makes sense to learn PHP. The only money i'm making right now is javascript (working on Business Catalyst sites) and Wordpress (custom themes and plugins.) Many decent self-described programmers would consider it shitwork, and they'd probably be right... But there's a lot more PHP work out there right now than there is Python or Rails.

(not that I know either... yet...)

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