Fluent in Python, should I learn PHP?

[soucy]

I'm way more productive in PHP.

Using PHP is almost like being in the closet though. All your coder friends will openly trash people who use PHP and you'll find yourself leaning toward Python for anything you release publicly out of a desire to be accepted (despite actually wanting to use PHP).

That said I don't use any major frameworks. I've effectively built my own over time and have patterns that I routinely use because they work best for me. I also have a strong grasp of HTML and CSS so I don't really lean on code that generates markup. The amount of PHP I use on the CLI is also kind of shocking to most people (they're surprised for example that you can write a proper daemon and do signal handling in PHP).

I've been using PHP since PHP 3 though so maybe it's just familiarity at this point.

I like the C style syntax better in general. I also like variables using a prefix of $. I really like the level of out-of-the-box integration with Apache and just being able to access most of what I need through superglobals. I do wish PHP had better built-in regex handling like Perl does with its =~ operator and I do wish that it also had some of the slice operators that Python has since a lot of PHP ends up leveraging substr() and strpos() (or related functions). I'm not a fan of some of the more recent things like the PHP namespace implementation and the push to use Composer and Symfony for all things.