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by aristofun 608 days ago
No serious software company would ever look at php for their new project. Except for some legacy reasons.

Also, don’t base such decisions on current job market snapshot whatever it is.

If you don’t feel like throwing up every time you deal with microsoft universe - c# is overall a solid choice, engineering and caree wise.

Rails is pretty big in North America, not at all in europe and it has strong bias towards startups.

JS(ts) is a solid choice overall - all sorts of companies from crappy devshops to faang on all continents use it for various projects.

Java (and other jvm stuff kike scala kotlin) is also a solid choice, but with a strong bias towards big boring corporations and large slow complex, often over-engineered projects.

Python has a strong bias towards AI/ML world. It’s rarely used outside of it for critical production software.

Ruby is a great choice for your first programming language to learn and as an example of a dynamic language with amazing devx. But it is limited mostly to rails based companies.

I suggest getting some commercial experience with 1 dynamic and 1 statically typed languages early in career.

2 comments

"No serious software company would ever look at php for their new project."

Why? Do you know that for a fact ? You will be surprised what people are doing with PHP in 2024 if you just look outside your echo chamber.

Any specific fresh examples? Or how do you know it’s not you who is in the echo chamber? )
Out of interest, why wouldn't PHP be a consideration? I thought it was pretty good now a days...
Because it’s a) scripting language b) not even a good one.

Even if modern versions somehow overcome those limitations - nobody would bet an expensive project while there are plenty of more relevant alternatives

Have you looked at startup jobs? Python is still super common despite a).

Regarding b) -- that's just like, your opinion, man. (I'd choose python over it any day, personally, but PHP with laravel is pretty great)

It’s not my opinion, it’s a statistical fact. Php was a pioneer and it deserves its respect for that. Bit it never was a tool for example to create next kafka with, or at least build some api gateway etc.

Laravel and others “advanced wordpress” use cases is not a “serious software” from technical POV.

> Because it’s a) scripting language b) not even a good one.

> Even if modern versions somehow overcome those limitations - nobody would bet an expensive project while there are plenty of more relevant alternatives

No, b) is absolutely your opinion (how can "LangX is not a good scripting language" be "statistical fact"? Come on.)

a) -- depends on your definition of expensive, but, again, I point to the tons of new (and old) companies choosing python all the time, even if some other language is "better" (for whatever your definition of better is)

We agree that neither PHP nor python would be good fits for building a database or similar. Doesn't make my points wrong.

Again - python was not originally a shitty templating engine. It doesn’t have all the bad sides and legacy of php.

Give me a single objective reason someone should prefer php over other (better) scripting languages in 2024?

Python is way out of php league btw, "php is good because it's scripting language just like python" is a very weak argument.

And if not for AI hype, who knows where whould it be today. But that's different story.

That was not an argument I made, and I don't know what AI has to do with it
Ruby, Python and JS are all scripting languages. Many "expensive projects" are created with them.
Those are the best ones.