What language to learn
I don’t think that PHP is the best language to be learning programming with—if only because it makes no sense as a first language. It’s a haphazard language that was really designed to be the easiest second language to be picked up If you already know programming and want the shortest distance to apply that knowledge to the web.
But as a first language? Hell, the language confuses the heck out of me!
However, there was a recent estimate that there are 5 million PHP developers worldwide. If true, that’s an impressive number. It makes PHP one of the most popular languages in the world, and more so, because it is a language that takes a back seat to Java and C when taught in universities.
But why are there 5 million PHP developers worldwide?
I believe it’s because the web is all about immersion. You have an itch (making a website) that you want scratched, and PHP makes that scratching pretty darn easy—you can do just about anything most people can think to do on the web for about $10 a month to a LAMP hosting service and a couple good open source downloads—no other language comes close.
Then again, there are 5 million PHP developers out there. If you want a job, learning PHP is not enough of a unique experience to warrant a set of experiences that will be valued. And someone telling me that they “know PHP” doesn’t tell me anything other than that person has learned what mysql_connect and mysql_query do.
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