I mean if you tinker around with programming languages a lot, odds are pretty good that you have also spent a few dozen hours on Python, and another few dozen on Ruby, and it's probably pretty hard to avoid spending dozens of hours mucking about with JS even if you don't like learning new languages just by virtue of it being necessary for writing web stuff or scraping stuff off existing webpages.

So yeah. Don't make PHP your first language. Probably not your second either. But if you've played with Python, and learned to write the simplest and clearest thing that can possibly work, if you've worked in C, and decided that's as close to the bare metal as you ever want to get, if you've learned enough Java to know when to use the SeriousBusinessFactoryProxyInterface, if Haskell has made you realize that programming is really just math... then sure, learn you some PHP, write a toy web project and discover that the simple things really can be simple.

I still don't know of any stacks where it's easier to write a simple, low maintenance side project that will stay up for years without issue, where multiple projects can share a $5 / month VPS, than the LAMP stack.

Not that I code in PHP anymore, and I havent for years (felt like I had to say that).

But PHP is a quite nice language with a lot less ceremony than many other languages. Especially nowadays as the article says.

Go make a Wordpress site!

> PHP gets you job offers customizing Drupal and Wordpress websites

I get that there's a lot of legacy PHP sites, that you could end up finding yourself working on. But there are still plenty of new Drupal and Wordpress sites being built.

You could also say that building a site with these tools as akin to "customising", as a lot of what you're doing is configuration rather than coding (but I would say sometimes JS + NPM is pretty similar). There are still opportunities to push yourself with coding, with some fairly complex Drupal sites being built.

> PHP has a lot of incredibly compelling alternatives

There's no alternative to dropping a file on a LAMP server that goes with almost 0 maintenance for price that goes to almost 0 with 0 downtime whenever you make a change.

PHP is my tool of choice whenever I need to create an simple endpoint but don't want to deal with the hassle of running and monitor a full blown application. At best, the alternative to that is AWS Lambda but that's a wall garden in itself

> then you could choose to pick up ..... better to have a new kind of tool in your belt than a second hammer.

Different tools for different job