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Also a point that hasn't been mentioned is this whole discussion seems to assume web development, because there are a lot of industries where specific languages are required and absolutely have a big impact on where you can go with your career. It's important to make that distinction if we're looking past Noodle's job and discussing general programming advice.
This is true but you can just learn that language if you want to go into one of those career tracks and it's not a big deal if you don't. Learning PHP instead of Ruby isn't going to hold him back from later learning q to get kdb+ jobs or learning Verilog to get into circuit design or learning any other language. We're on this derail because some people thought PHP is something that should be avoided. I'm not saying learning French over Mandarin is a great idea if you plan on moving to China - merely that French, in a vacuum, is not a bad language to learn, especially if that's the only foreign language offered at your school.
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I'm also not buying that there's no objectively bad languages to learn, maybe PHP isn't terrible enough to illustrate this point. If Noodle had said his job offer was at some government agency's records office maintaining legacy COBOL applications would the advice be the same? Because it shouldn't be.
Well if that's the best job he could get, it is what it is but this is a good point and that's why I qualified it as "mainstream language" - this was my first post that triggered this whole thing:
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Originally Posted by candybar
PHP is a perfectly reasonable modern language at this point btw - this isn't the 90's any more and the differences between most mainstream languages are fairly minor.
There are definitely some languages that simply don't teach you how to program in a modern context but PHP is not one of them - it's firmly in that group of popular languages that largely share similar semantics (Perl, PHP, JavaScript, then looking slightly broadly, also Python and Ruby) and switching between them should be largely seamless. Btw, I think Ruby is probably the language to avoid if you are sensitive about this kind of stuff but again it's a minor concern. If you're a good Ruby programmer, you're a good programmer and if you're a good programmer, this kind of thing is a fairly minor concern.