Shanahan wrote:PHP is a dying language
Development of PHP has been more active and organized in the past five years than at any time in its past, and I've been using PHP for 15 years.
Shanahan wrote:PHP is also the most used back-end web language in the world.
It depends on how that is measured. Very few of the huge Web sites out there today use PHP server-side. However, PHP still retains its position as the most widely-deployed server-side language because it is included in almost every economy Web hosting plan and it is free.
Shanahan wrote:PHP jobs mainly exist because of WordPress
I have no way to gauge that. WordPress is a very active environment today and growing, so consider that WordPress would not exist were it not for PHP.
Shanahan wrote:PHP means you're working with old legacy code
That's what all the Python programmers say.
PHP may not be the most elegant server-side language in the world but it is probably the most practical, down-to-earth server-side language in the world. It was designed specifically to script for Web sites. That's not even true for Perl, which was adapted for use on the Web and was used before PHP proved itself a better choice. Neither Python nor any other major language has built-in Web support; it's always bolted on to the side.
Shanahan wrote:I am asking from a career point of view.
My career advice to you is not to worry so much about the particular language and instead concentrate on becoming an excellent programmer, developing skills that will be valuable no matter which language is involved. I've programmed in about 30 languages in my career, being paid to program in about 15 of them. The excellent language I used in my first job no longer exists.
Some of the highest paid programmers in the world are 70-somethings who help companies support "legacy" code written in - wait for it - COBOL.