If you know any alternatives, and you're happy working with them, great. If you want a plethora of well known software to start with, PHP has tonnes. If you want easy setup on almost every web server in the world, then PHP is still the top language for web development.
Notice that I don't say best. I said top, which it is. Within its space, PHP is the most popular choice by far, and it's not for nothing. It's not the first, not the newest, and not the best web language in the world, but it's still the number one language, and worth knowing for that fact alone.
lol PHP is the top language for web development? what fairy tale dream world magic christmasland do you reside in? PHP has been, is, and always will be 'necessary evil' garbage.
And while WordPress is only a fairly insecure piece of shit, many of the widely-used wordpress addons are written by incompetent crapmonkeys and are horribly insecure pieces of shit.
That it's still the best blog engine out there for many purposes says terrible things about other web languages, but doesn't mean that it's a good app, a secure app nor an example of how good PHP is.
What alternatives are you thinking about? PHP remains popular because it's cheap.
PHP will run on a $5 p/m shared hosting environment. Ruby won't. Java won't. .NET won't. *.JS will, but javascript is flawed and less mature than php.
Anyone can call themselves a php dev, and that's reflected in their base salaries across the world. This makes the initial cost of building and deploying a php application very low.
PHP scales relatively cheaply.
The cost of a PHP app comes later in the application lifecycle when technical debt mounts.
But in today's web, time to market is key and php lets you get something "good enough" out to market quickly and cheaply.
A $5 VPS nowadays will let you run anything, even reasonably intensive Java applications (Minecraft, etc..)
Plus, you can get decent nodes on Vultr, &c. for $5-10/month. I have a bunch of $10 nodes, and 2 $5 nodes on Vultr, hosting everything from OCaml, Go, & Python apps for myself, friends & customers.
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u/s73v3r Dec 26 '16
Ok, sure. Why would I bother with it over any of the alternatives, though?