There's really something to this. A friend of mine recently received an email to her dev shop criticizing her for using PHP. The funny thing is, she knows the guy who sent the email. He runs an IT business and sent an article to her client about the latest web technologies, then the client said "we use PHP, is that OK?" to which IT guy, with close to zero web experience, replied that it wasn't.
I was pretty upset on her behalf because she and her team do really awesome work and it's not like they are using the same PHP you'd use back in the early 2000s.
I'm wondering if paying so much attention to new tech just naturally makes people a bit more shallow when it comes to actually using tech.
Very important parts of the web continue to use PHP. Forget WordPress, we're talking fast, scaleable, well engineered applications built by software engineers, being used by millions of people a day. Built using the same software engineering principles you would use in any other language. It's just a language after all, and both the language and it's community have matured a great deal.
And the market for PHP developers is huge -- thanks to WordPress and legacy systems -- but the pay is much lower in most markets. Why hire someone who knows the fundamentals when you can hire someone who knows the fundamentals and your tech stack?
I was pretty upset on her behalf because she and her team do really awesome work and it's not like they are using the same PHP you'd use back in the early 2000s.
I'm wondering if paying so much attention to new tech just naturally makes people a bit more shallow when it comes to actually using tech.