I've been a PHP programmer for most of my professional career and switched a few years ago. PHP has a bad name for a long time. True or not, this started weighing on me and I shared a lot of the opinions you wrote here.
People will continue to roll their eyes. Whether deserved is besides the point. I was no longer interested in being a 'PHP programmer' and have to justify my worth. PHP is by all measures on it's way out. If you are looking at other ecosystems of course you're going to find things that aren't great. PHP has those too but in the 15 years you've been doing it you've created habits that perfectly avoid those. You're not going to attain those same skills immediately elsewhere, and the things that are worse from your perspective are going to stand out more than the things that are better.
You've tied your professional identity to a programming language that people dislike. It's not a fun place to be, but trust me you'll be better off in the long run. This has NOTHING to do with language features, and everything with your feelings and bitterness. Your post is full of emotions. It's not worth feeling this way, it's just a programming language.
Appreciate the comment, but to be clear I haven't worked on a PHP project professionally in over 6 years.
I wouldn't say my professional identity is tied to PHP. I don't even consider it my strongest language anymore because I haven't used it day-in day-out for years, plus the vast majority of my professional experience came prior to PHP 7 and Laravel. I'm more of a PHP 5 + Zend guy.
I use PHP for personal projects simply because I find I'm much more productive with it. Emotionally I love writing Java & TypeScript code because I find both to be beautifully designed languages. PHP is fine and to your point, I have grown to love it in a lot of ways. I do love working with Laravel though, but that's not because of PHP, but just because every 10 minutes I'm thinking, "holy crap, that was easy". Everything you'd want is there and works and it all works as you'd expect.
Java "beautifully designed"? Java 19 still can't parse a regex properly, ie. without having to escape metacharacters. Which other commonly-used language has such a lousy regex implementation?
I agree with this. Anacdotally I spent years fighting my way out of the perception of being a "PHP programmer". Despite having open source projects in a litany of languages, it was all interviewees wanted to talk about.
I eventually lucked into working for a consulting firm who trusted me to work on goland and python and JS projects for two years, and that job on my CV means magically my twenty years of experience is now worth much (~$100k) more on the job market and nobody asks about my PHP work anymore.
The fact that PHP stands at 78% and Javascript stands at 2% in the report is counterintuitive. This anomaly might be caused by all the Wordpress sites that are out there, if so, readers should not use this report to steer their career.
WordPress accounts for 40% which leaves 38% not WordPress, which still stomps JS's 2% into the dirt. I use both, but lets be objective here and not cherry pick.
I don't know the numbers, but I would guess that more people sit NodeJS servers behind a CDN or proxy of some kind than PHP, making it potentially harder to identify.
People will continue to roll their eyes. Whether deserved is besides the point. I was no longer interested in being a 'PHP programmer' and have to justify my worth. PHP is by all measures on it's way out. If you are looking at other ecosystems of course you're going to find things that aren't great. PHP has those too but in the 15 years you've been doing it you've created habits that perfectly avoid those. You're not going to attain those same skills immediately elsewhere, and the things that are worse from your perspective are going to stand out more than the things that are better.
You've tied your professional identity to a programming language that people dislike. It's not a fun place to be, but trust me you'll be better off in the long run. This has NOTHING to do with language features, and everything with your feelings and bitterness. Your post is full of emotions. It's not worth feeling this way, it's just a programming language.