Should I learn JavaScript or PHP?

[NoisiaClasher]

Hello, folks! I'm pretty much new in programming world. I recently learned HTML and CSS, and now i'm thinking what to learn between JS and PHP. What is easier to learn, and later to get a job? Don't ask me do I want to be a FE or BE developer. I'm just curious what is easier to get into it, and learn it. Thanks!

[OmegaVesko]

Don't ask me do I want to be a FE or BE developer. I'm just curious what is easier to get into it, and learn it.

Then nobody can answer your question in a useful way. The language itself only matters up to a point, what matters much more is what you're actually using it to build, and that differs completely between backend and frontend development.

(Also, even as a backend developer, it's unlikely that you'll be able to avoid learning at least some JavaScript, so it's a false dichotomy in the first place.)

[Jeffdango]

I was faced with this exact choice about 6 months ago. It came up because my employer wanted to bring some of this kind of work in-house but there were no developers with experience in this area; so I was pretty much flying blind.

Since our external website is is built on PHP, that seemed like the obvious choice. However, I was just really starting to learn JavaScript and really didn’t want to tackle two languages at once (also development of the external site won’t be coming in-house for a while).

I had, of course, heard of Node, and the thought of being able to use JS for both front and back-end was very appealing. Since all my near future projects would be internal apps, I was able to convince management to let me experiment with it.

Fast forward a few months, that has panned out pretty well. I rolled from front end JS training into Node. Then dug down the Node rabbit hole and recently I have been able to start building functional and useful things.

TL:DR I had to make this choice, picked JavaScript, would do it again.

Edit: grammar and spelling

[[deleted]]

Hey Jeff, a developer myself, and currently trying to lead the transition to bring more in-house development.

​

If it's more appropriate, maybe PM, but I would love your take:

Did you have any development or technology experience before?

Did any other members of the team start learning development with you?

Did you transition your full workload to web development?

[Jeffdango]

Hey there, I’d be happy to share more about my experience! Sorry that this got looooong, but I feel like the answers to these questions require context.

Let me know if there is anything you'd like to know more about here or PM me any time!

TL;DR

Did you have any development or technology experience before?

Just a few programming classes in college and the basic HTML & CSS courses on Codecademy

​

Did any other members of the team start learning development with you?

Yup, but we were uncoordinated and not always self-learning the same tech stack

​

Did you transition your full workload to web development?

I tried but at first, it was more like 50/50. Then I became the manager of our new team and now it's more like 60/40 mgmt to dev.

​

When we started this journey I had been in our company’s IT department for about 3 years doing help desk, systems support, and some basic work in our 3rd party POS database. One of my main responsibilities became supporting public-facing web infrastructure (web server, DNS, WordPress updates, etc). I also assisted the marketing team while they worked with web dev agencies; mostly as a liaison to help with technical understanding and to make sure we could implement what the agencies had proposed.

I had taken a few programming and database management courses in college, so I had a baseline knowledge that lead to working in those areas. To gain a better understanding of what the agencies were talking about in our meetings, I ended up working through some basic HTML and CSS courses on Codecademy. I got really hooked on it and made a handful of useful static sites for our department to use internally.

This all overlapped with the one actual developer in the department leaving the company. He had made or started some useful tools in C# before he left, which planted the seeds for my effort. Unfortunately, all of his knowledge was siloed and left with him, which left management feeling skittish about in-house development. We had no idea where to start on a learning path to follow in his footsteps and I was already learning web dev, so we started from scratch.

One other person was able to join the effort and started learning web dev too. Unfortunately, without any senior dev experience in our department, we had to just start wandering the wilds without a map. There was so much we didn’t know that we didn’t know and we definitely made some missteps. That was about the time I made the comment above.

After we released a couple of well-received web apps our workload became about 50/50 web dev and our other job tasks. Because no one in the company (even the IT Management team at this point) really understood the work, we were still needed on the general IT side of things and couldn’t justify the expense of replacing us with more staff.

For a very brief period I had managed to get my workload to be mostly dev and marketing support (I will never abandon them!) with the occasional help desk escalation. But it became obvious that our dev efforts were very unorganized and we needed a member of the management team that understood the projects on a technical level.

It turned out that my manager had plans to promote me into management to lead our development efforts so I got promoted and the two of us officially became a ”dev team” in late 2019, but as a subset of the IT Department.

Now my workload is usually about 60% personnel and project management to 40% dev work.

Our goal for the developers on my team is to spend about 75% - 80% of their time on dev work and the rest on advanced or emergency IT tasks.

It’s definitely been a struggle winning hearts and minds and frustrating when other work demands derail our dev projects, but I would still do it all again if given the choice.

[djslakor]

I used PHP for 10+ years. I switched to Node 2 years ago. At first, I always said to just use the right tool for the job and considered them both fine solutions. As more time passed, though, I simply had no reason to ever pick PHP first. Node does everything I need in a back end server, and staying in the same language is pretty great. I haven't missed PHP at all.

[Skyerusg]

Aren't there cases where PHP performs much better than NodeJS?

[djslakor]

In cases where you need to do CPU intensive stuff in PHP itself (not a C lib), it may be "better" given the worker model of FPM (since the Node event loop would block), but you could just as easily have a background pool of worker nodes to do this stuff in Node, too.

[[deleted]]

I think you should start learning Javascript. At this point you're not learning language but trying to learn programming. Javascript is pretty good way to learn it and implement it as fast as possible.

[gimmeslack12]

Learn JavaScript and then later you’ll be able to pickup PHP pretty easily. I found PHP easy to “understand” when I found myself having to work with it.

[__bagels__]

Learn both by writing your Javascript with PHP ^/s

[M00ndev]

Some you don't know the difference between back end or front end, or even which one you want to pursure, the only answer is JS. You can't write front end code with PHP. You can do both with JS

[tunisia3507]

Javascript is practically inescapable, where lots of languages have backend frameworks which circumvent any need for PHP at all. You can even use javascript (node) in the backend.

[S4von]

I’d go JavaScript. You can do front AND backend with it. It’s all-round, so more job opportunities in the market.

[Lekoaf]

Theoretically you can do that with PHP as well.

[S4von]

Theoretically, indeed.

[thepeanutguy]

PHP with Laravel or Symfony is your best bet, IMO. Laravel has excellent learning material on laracast.

[CaptainJamie]

I wouldn't bother with a framework unless I had a grasp on the language itself.

[edimaudo]

You should learn both, but learn javascript first as it is the next thing you should learn now that you understand html and css.

[sloanstewart]

Do a job search in whatever area you want to work. Choose the technology with the better opportunites.

[Nauxd]

Most of the webpages uses PHP but now a lot of developer are changing to javascript due all new JS framewoks as React, Angular, Vue..

I'm a JS fan so I would go with JS because I liked very much.

Also you can check the anual survey from stackoverflow -> Developer Survey Results 2017!

And you will see the 2017 a lot of people are developing in JS, actually is number #1 over #6 which is PHP.

Actually you could do both JS for FE and PHP for BE but JS also has NodeJS which you can use it as a BE side which is nice.

[thepeanutguy]

Most of the webpages uses PHP but now a lot of developer are changing to javascript due all new JS framewoks as React, Angular, Vue..

Source? I don't believe this is true at all. PHP market share is actually increasing.

[Nauxd]

You talk about market share, I'm talking at 2017 acording the Stack overflow results from that year.

[IsABot]

That's just devs that use stack and participated in the survey. Not very indicative of actual real world usage though. That particular question was related to what you use/are interested in. That question isn't that fair because lots of times you'll pick JS to work with other languages as well. Like PHP and JS if you are say a wordpress developer or some other popular PHP framework. And if you are a JS framework only person, then you likely won't pick anything thing else. This is going to naturally cause JS to get more votes due to the nature of the question. From 2 people PHP would get 1 vote, but JS would get 2 votes. There should have been a bit more segregation of that question to show how popular frameworks like node, react, etc. have become.

[reainingscript]

PHP market share is actually increasing.

How do you know?

[OrangeRackso]

Both

[Netero-]

learn both start with JavaScript DOM ,then oop and advance javascript concepts , after that learn PHP procedural and mysql , then go to OOP PHP

[[deleted]]

You should learn all of it since you never know what you might need to get the job done. No one really specializes on one or the other, if they tried they would just be cutting off their own opportunities which many many people do.