[scarecrowbob]

Just to offer an alternate perspective, I am a developer who spends most of his paid time working on PHP projects, either on a bespoke framework used by a company I work with and a whole lot of WordPress (I'm not a fan, but it is very easy to get well-paid remote work in this system).

In the last couple of years, I have learned a number of other languages and frameworks, mostly whatever the "hip" folks are using (Zend, RoR, Django, Ember, Backbone), and of these the only thing that really is useful on a day to day level has been the python scraping framework, Scrapy.

Each of these systems has brought me new ways to think about PHP and Javascript code that I never would thought about if I was solely intent on solving the problems I had at hand as best I could in the PHP idioms used by WordPress and this bespoke web framework.

For instance, I certainly wouldn't be as comfortable with the map functions if I hadn't done just that little bit of playing Haskell that I did.

So in my case, learning other idioms for programming, even those which I don't apply directly, has been tremendously useful in understanding better ways to work with the systems that I have to work with in a day-to-day situation.