I do want to learn lots of different technologies, including PHP! That's part of the reason I read Hacker News in the first place.
But I'm doubtful of its real-world application these days. Most news I see never mentions it, but Ruby and Python are mentioned near constantly.
I'm sure working at Facebook would be amazing. I mean, it's Facebook. But if I also got internship offers at Google and other high-tech companies, then the language I use at work will factor in.
And PHP doesn't seem nearly as significant as these other languages, so then why take a job where I'll learn and use it in-depth for months when there are other languages?
You're going to be sorely disappointed when you find out that the majority of user-facing applications at Google are in Java, which you'll hear even less of on places like here.
The reason you don't see mentions of PHP all the time on places like here is that Python and Ruby are considered "hip" languages right now. Every one and their mother wants to learn it to show off how cool it is. Which is freaking awesome because the more people that learn nice scripting languages the better, but it means people aren't being driven to build new services on PHP to show off because instead of listing off 10-20 buzzword plugins by other people, you have a limited amount of mature things you can use to make a PHP application. This is not saying that Python and Ruby don't have mature platforms and extensions.
Have you done any professional programming in the past? I absolutely guarantee that even doing an short term internship at a company using a programming language you don't know, the nuances of that specific language won't be what you take away from you but rather the different ways to think about a specific problem.
Maybe once every month I face a problem at work or on personal projects where I can say "Hey, I remember this, it's a really obscure PHP fault!" versus many many times a times a day when I think "hmm I could build this as a singleton or a factory or a ....." and can use my previous experience programming in those fashions at previous jobs to figure out what the best way to do it currently is.
Learning a new language isn't about dedicating your life to it. It's about learning new methods of completing tasks, which you can almost always apply to other languages.
It's fairly easy to construct a portfolio of web applications in whatever language you want to use and/or demonstrate competency in a language (eg contribute to open source), but it's much more difficult to say you worked on an application at the scale of Facebook. That experience is invaluable and the lessons you learn there are applicable even when you move on to applications in other languages.
You should also probably look at surveys of language adoption b/c PHP has much greater market share. Hacker News is a very skewed sample.
But I'm doubtful of its real-world application these days. Most news I see never mentions it, but Ruby and Python are mentioned near constantly.
I'm sure working at Facebook would be amazing. I mean, it's Facebook. But if I also got internship offers at Google and other high-tech companies, then the language I use at work will factor in.
And PHP doesn't seem nearly as significant as these other languages, so then why take a job where I'll learn and use it in-depth for months when there are other languages?