With people complaining about PHP so much, I really what to know why.
I'm thinking about learning it, I'm always up for a challenge

First, what are your reasons for wanting to learn PHP?

@kvsm Web development mostly

I find that people who say they hate PHP tend to be the snobs who use some obscure language or who are stuck in the 90s.
I quite like PHP, and along with Node they are my favourite ways of doing backend development. I'm a frontend dev by the way.

@RinseRepeat yeah that's not the case for me, since I have started coding not too long ago.

Okay, well if you just want to learn (server side) web development in general, you are probably best to do that in the context of a web framework, which will simplify a lot of the grunt work. Popular frameworks which aren't too hard to pick up include Express (Node/JavaScript) and Rails (Ruby). Plenty of good tutorials online can help you get started with those.

Now back to your question, why not PHP? Web frameworks exist for PHP, Symphony and Cake are two. But at the end of the day, you're still lumbered with PHP. I won't go into all the reasons why PHP is bad, many people have already done that so I'll find a link and post it below. What I will say is that as it dies out as a commonly used language, PHP developers are going to be left maintaining a lot of other people's old code without much opportunity for new projects. That's not a career I'd look forward too.

PHP explained: https://eev.ee/blog/2012/...

@kvsm Well, I can try at least and make up my own mind. It doesn't hurt to learn stuff.

@birkenspanner You certainly can, but the thing with learning new technologies is that it costs us an investment of time, so when there are several other options for commonly used languages/frameworks/whatever, all vying for an investment of our time, out helps to filter it some of the bad choices.

That's why you asked the question, right? 😊

@kvsm yeah, but it's not like I'll lose valuable time or money from doing so. I'm still a student and do that coding and programming stuff in my free time...