[vatotemking]

This may sound hurtful but hear me out - One thing worth mentioning why someone would not want to use PHP in 2020 is that a PHP programmer is looked down upon by other programmers.

And im saying this without hate or malice. I love PHP since I was a PHP dev from 5.2 - 7.0. I built PHP libraries and WordPress plugins that have helped many people. Ive since moved to Node because PHP jobs have dried up in my country.

PHP devs arent respected which is sad because we all belong to the same programming community. And PHP has contributed a lot to the proliferation of websites. At the end of the day programming languages dont matter to businesses as long as it gets the job done at a reasonabe cost.

[wolco]

In fairness the wheel has turned and node developers are seen as not respected. If you haven't moved to go/rust/serverless by 2018 the cool market has moved.

When I got started in 2000, php developers weren't as smart as perl developers. Then it was asp. No serious business would use php over asp. Java developers always had this attutiude but they were always treated as second class from c++ developers who were treated bad by c developers who were using a toy language compared to asm.

At some point 2006/2007 php became cool. But then the facebook movie came out and php was uncool again. Ruby on rails was better (unless you were twitter and wanted to scale). Then node. Go. Serverless.

PHP has always been anticool and looked down on. You need a strong sense of self to get involved.

[optymizer]

As a fun, tongue-in-cheek project, someone should build a website with this timeline of languages going from cool to uncool.

For people who are busy with life and work, but who want to learn a new cool language, it would answer the question "what's the cool thing right now?". You look at the timeline, it's language X.

This also enables fun future oniony articles like "Go no longer cool", "Rust going the way of the dinosaur", "C++ is the new kid on the block", "Node.js is dead, long live X" etc.

[vatotemking]

You forgot the "X is considered harmful" article.

[lowercased]

I think you forgot the "ColdFusion" crowd looking down on PHP too... :)

[gnarbarian]

Haters gonna hate. Node.js programmers are looked down upon too by go programmers. C programmers are an anachronism, haskell is for academic navel gazing etc. Small minds think their favorite language is the best because they can't see outside their own problem domain.

Languages are tools that suit different needs. Use the best tool for the job, pay attention to industry trends so you don't become a Cobol dinosaur with no job prospects. Switching to node is a good career move but it won't be your last. Node has incredible momentum and developer mindshare. You can accomplish a lot with it but node projects are difficult to maintain.

Never stop learning or growing.

[mnm1]

I look down upon people who look down upon people for their technology choices and would never willingly work with such assholes. Your point is irrelevant because those are people I have no interest in working with. To look down upon others (rather than a language) indicates that one is a complete idiot, asshole, and someone I'd rather not meet. Better those people self select out of my life when they hear php because they would clearly be a detriment to me and to anyone who isn't a moron like them. Not to mention unprofessional, naive, and arrogant.

[joelbluminator]

Oof you have no idea how Ruby devs are shat on, sometimes by other miserable Ruby devs.