So you know someone that is an expert at building sand foundations, and selling them? That’s a good thing, and something to emulate?
For a lot of folks (especially hereabouts), “makes money” is the only valid metric.
That’s not my experience or personal PoV. I’ve been shipping (as opposed to “writing”) code, for over 30 years. Pretty much everything I’ve written, has made it out the door (although not always to subsequent success). I’m fairly familiar with what it takes to ship. I agree that it’s a relatively uncommon skillset, but I’ve also learned to ship stuff with a future. One of the projects I developed, took ten years to come into its own, and it had to stay solid for all that time, until the right team could take it over. The fact that the code is well-written, well-supported, and well-documented, is the main reason that it finally took off.
I don’t like PHP, and one reason, has been alluded in other comments. It’s a sand foundation. Over the years, it has been massively backfilled, and is now pretty damn robust, but the sand foundation is still visible.
But it is a useful tool, if wielded correctly. If used incorrectly, though, that’s another story, and there’s a lot of bad PHP out there.
I have heard a quote, attributed to Stroustrop, that goes “With C, you can shoot yourself in the foot. With C++, you can blow your whole leg off.” I’m skeptical he’s the one that said it, but it’s a truism.
I have a friend that is an arborist (tree guy). He’s really experienced, and really good at it, and makes great money.
Watching him use chainsaws, though, is kinda terrifying. For one thing, every one of his saws has the safety guard removed, and he’ll go monkeying up a tree, with three running chainsaws, hanging off him. He uses them like you’d use a fork at the dinner table, and can take down a huge locust tree, in an hour or so, alone.
He makes it look easy, but I’m not so idiotic, as to think I could emulate him.
We have a running joke, every time he sees me, he holds up his hand, showing that he still has all his fingers, because I told him that he would end up chopping off a finger or two.
There now exists a huge base of very good PHP programmers. It took quite a while to coalesce, but it’s here. I don’t claim to be one of them, but I have used the language to ship some fairly ambitious stuff, for the last quarter century or so, so I can wrangle it reasonably well.