I was underestimated about tech skills and earning, because I use PHP at work. I agree that PHP sucks and it's used by a lot of developers who don't know how it works. But the legacy systems I work on now compose a platform used by more than 400K users. In addition, I used to use C++ for game programming and Java for web systems. Also I'm playing with Node.js and javascript for my personal projects. In my experience, I don't think PHP is easy to make things work as expected. Plus, I don't get low salary compared to the others in this region. It's always very hard to explain how I'm working as a PHP developer. At the moment of underestimation, I was feeling so bad, but I couldn't say anything. It might lead a religious argue. Any advice?

Why does php get so much hate? Wasn't facebook built using php?

Hang in there. Never mind the puritan geek bullies. Dismissing a language because it's "easy" is just pure horse crap! Take it from someone who started coding in the 80s: Languages are becoming "easier" all the time. That's a good thing, not a bad thing, and it's called progress! All the languages you mentioned are high-level anyway. I can't see how, for example Node.js would be more techy than PHP. Anyway, hardly any of the languages used today would have qualified as "real" languages back in the days when Assembler was the only language that was not frowned about.

@valium123 PHP gets hate because of inconsistencies of naming things and order of parameters in functions.

Because its a scriptinglanguage (not compiled) and there is a lot of bad php code around.

I don't see why you even have to say that you are a "PHP Developer", i just say i'm a software developer, i work with whatever language the client needs me to work with (If they don't have any opinion or legacy i choose what i think will work best given the project and available team members), If it happens to be PHP i just charge an extra $10/hour to cover the cost of anti-depressants (We have heavily subsidised meds here)

@Codex404 And that makes it different from, say...javascript how?

I agree with @ItsNotMyFault. We are devs, not MFTL devs.

@TerriToniAX it doesnt, but javascript also gets a lot of hate.

@Codex404 True enough :) It gets a lot of love too, but one reason it's so popular is that other programming languages natively supported by browsers are...
...
...
(still trying to come to think of one ;))

@ItsNotMyFault Actually, I don't say I'm a PHP developer, mostly I say Software engineer. But when I'm talking about my work, always asked what language I use. Even though I say "it's PHP, but I don't care about languages." There's a bias that Java developer is the most well-paid in my country: I'm working in another one.

Ooh, I would love if web clients could be programmed in C##.

@TerriToniAX C##? I woulf love XAML instead of HTML

@valium123 Facebook was built at a time when the 3 main web platforms were PHP, ASP(The old VBScript version), and Perl, neither of which can be considered good.

Shortly after facebook was released we got solid web frameworks like rails and django (for ruby and python) and a few years later Microsoft joined the party with .Net MVC (and today we even have solid web frameworks for C++ if you're bent that way)

PHP otoh isn't suited for those kinds of frameworks due to its execution model, Laravel is probably the PHP framework that gets closest to whats available in other languages but its performance is horrible (mainly due to PHPs "share nothing" execution model forcing it to re-initialize middleware and routing tables on each request).

If you don't want to use a heavy framework PHP becomes a bit more OK performance wise but then you have lua which is cleaner, simpler and significantly faster so ... not much point.

@Codex404 That would give us WPF on the web :)

Lol isn't facebook still in php? It works well

@ItsNotMyFault 😂

Top 2 reason I know -
-Global variable namespace
-High memory overhead

Nodejs doesn't require Apache to be installed. You can run nodejs server application just like any Python program without environment config. Npm is great and it's growth is faster than what was expected

Facebook uses lots of other language too, like C, python, java, for different different stuff.

@valium123 facebook actually uses a heavily modified version of PHP (Hack, running on HHVM). They've removed a lot of the bad parts with php, and added new stuff (types etc). So you're a little right and a little wrong :)

Also compiling application directly to machine code

@yusijs is hack or hhvm used by people outside facebook as well? Never heard od it but it looks really nice.

@Codex404 it is open source, but idk how actively used it is. Guess the biggest use case would be legacy systems, altho with php7 idk how big the perf gains are anymore - been years since I actively worked with php.

Despite the fact that today I'm already working in a successful software company, I still find time to learn PHP. I think that it is absolutely worth learning. Even if php developers salary https://bridgee.pro/blog/... is considered to be the average compared to developers of other web back-end programming languages like RoR, for instance. Nowadays it is really hard to find really great talent among others.