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Discussion on: What is the next language you want to learn, and why?

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Ben Halpern

Wasn't expecting to see PHP, but I feel like maturity does get so overlooked as a quality of a language. Lack of maturity in so many ways is my absolute biggest frustration whenever I work with JavaScript.

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Zeke Gabrielse

Same. I often find myself getting frustrated with JavaScript's volatile ecosystem.

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Martin Betz

I wasnt't expecting to learn PHP, actually. Python has been a dear friend for quite a few years, but for my projects often Django and even Flask felt like an overkill. And I often struggled with packages for functionality that seemed very important to me, especially user management. I had a very bad opinion about PHP, mainly because of Wordpress' wild source code, some very strange plugins from its ecosystem and documentation that is so scattered around the web and often not reliable. But Composer, Packagist, Symfony and also the great learning resources (Laracasts, Laravel-News.com) really are my go-to learning places right now.

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Sina K

After 15 years of PHP, Python/Django was a breath of fresh air... sandwiched in there was Ruby. I could never see Flask as overkill for anything, it is pretty much a framework with nothing - how did that become overkill?

Django with Rest Framework allows me to create backends in an instance with full admin CRUD for whatever front-end of the week (been through Angular, React and now Ember) I would do a bakeoff any day of the week against PHP and Laravel (I could even bake-off against myself, hehe...)

PHP has it's merits, but I am so glad to be rid of a the toolbox with too many dysfunctional hammers and screwdrivers.

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Daniel Lo Nigro

Personally I'd rather use a stack that's tried and tested, and that I know will still be around in a few years time. I've had heaps of issues getting Node.js sites working after server upgrades, whereas PHP sites I created 10+ years ago are still happily running on PHP 7 with no issues and only minor updates required. For new sites I'd stick to PHP or ASP.NET, the server-side JavaScript ecosystem is just too volatile for me to even consider using it for any serious development.

Also see: Happiness is a Boring Stack: expatsoftware.com/articles/happine...