[coolguy4]

PHP is a pain to work with. It doesn't have the tools that other languages have. The libraries available for PHP tend to be buggy or poorly designed.

The market for PHP developers isn't going to go away, but if you work somewhere that is using PHP there is a good chance you won't be working somewhere with a strong engineering focus. So you probably won't have great people to learn from and you will limit your growth as a software engineer.

[velmu]

PHP is not perfect, but there has been definite improvement. Tooling is now pretty good with PHPStorm (from JetBrains), Composer is a fine dependency/packet manager and a framework like Symfony sets good guidelines and stability for development.

In addition eCommerce and Content Management System tools and ecosystems are still by far the most popular out there. After years of Node.js hype there is still nothing that rivals WordPress in terms of flexibility and ease of use. Same goes for Magento on the eCommerce end. Not that WP or Magento are good examples of high quality codebases.

All that said, there are no longer arguments why you would use PHP specifically. In that sense it has lost it's edge and you can use any number of languages for developing CRUD apps for the web. But if you need to get shit done, there is nothing wrong with PHP and your customers couldn't care less.

[coldtea]

>PHP is a pain to work with. It doesn't have the tools that other languages have.

Like what?

>The libraries available for PHP tend to be buggy or poorly designed.

Which? In what era? Compared to what? The mountains of crap (alongside quality stuff) on npm?