[jabloczko]

Why focus on PHP?

I've been at this game long enough now to recognize that it's more valuable to think of being at a "layer" of the tech stack. In your case with PHP I'm guessing you're part of the web stack. There are plenty of languages for which you'd have plenty of pre-existing web experience that would make it easy to develop in. I'm mostly in the web stack as well and I've used several different languages at different companies and really never cared.

[thaumaturgy]

I've been at this game long enough now (over 20 years professionally!) to learn that it takes time to gain an expert-level proficiency at any new language, and that no modern language exists in isolation -- it is also its community, packages, libraries, and frameworks. I've also learned that there's value in doing work you enjoy.

PHP is the one language where everyone feels comfortable suggesting changing to some other language. I should have followed HN's advice and become a novice Ruby on Rails developer 10 years ago, and then a novice Golang developer, and now I could be a novice NodeJS developer! If only...

There's nothing wrong with asking around to see if anybody's looking for a strong [language] dev. I just wish it were possible to see the word "php" in an HN thread without it being followed by some subset of the same tedious replies.

[0xEF]

I love HN but you are right, and I feel like I can never mention the language I use at my job the most because I'd get the same unsolicited replies about how every other users' preferred language is better than mine.

I wish that culture would just die already and we could have more honest discussions about actual use-cases where one particular language might be a better choice.

[danjfoley]

Where do I work that uses..PHP? And I like PHP. Yeah people love to hate it. It's a modern language. It's almost trendy for people to hate it.

[Mashimo]

> Why focus on PHP?

Because he likes PHP :)

[danjfoley]

I like PHP.