[danso]

The other day on my way to the airport, I had an Uber driver in Portland who was telling me that he was just about to start a lengthy coding bootcamp in JavaScript and PHP. Not Node, just front-end JS. And Rails was one of the options, but he opted to do PHP with a focus on Drupal.

Kind of blew me away. I know Rails seems to have waned relative to when coding bootcamps first became big, but I had thought PHP was well past its attractiveness for new developers, despite the number of PHP systems that need maintaining in the real world.

[20years]

This is probably not the popular opinion in this crowd BUT PHP is still the most used back-end language on the web. It has also come a long way since it's early days. Modern PHP is actually decent to work in and learning it will keep you gainfully employed in most areas outside the Bay Area.

For back-end, Python & PHP are still my go to choices. Both are stable, have tons of libraries, have good frameworks and allow you to get stuff done quickly.

[sotojuan]

While I would've also chosen Rails, the truth is that there's plenty more PHP jobs out there, even in cities like Portland so he'll be fine either way.

[ryanSrich]

There are far more PHP and Java jobs for entry level devs in Portland. Since we don't have very many startups the tech jobs are mostly at financial institutions and non-tech companies.