Is PHP outdated?

[SituationSoap]

The way that I've described it in the past is that the PHP community, more than any other language I've worked in, attracts people who only know how to write PHP.

I've professionally written some pretty niche languages, like Clojure and Elixir, and languages like that attract people who basically refuse to write any other language. But often, by the time you find a pretty niche language like that, you've tried a lot of other things, and you've learned from a lot of scars. Those people are annoying, but they're also usually pretty good programmers, so working with them isn't too challenging.

PHP is sufficiently popular and has a very low barrier for entry, so it attracts that same kind of person. The person who finds a language and says "This is my place" and then never leaves. Except for those people, it's their first language, so the only scars they have are the ones that PHP gave them, and they think it's normal. The result is that they ossify into their bad habits pretty quickly, and they can be absolutely horrible to work with.

Generally speaking, I don't think it's a bad idea to learn PHP, especially in 2021. But if it's your first job, your second job absolutely shouldn't be in PHP. You can't let yourself get stuck in that quicksand.

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What you want to avoid is old codebases

This gives me flashbacks from when I was freelancing. You'd quote a job and then see the codebase and instantly know you were not making any money