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To answer your question: Whether it be PHP or Python or Ruby, you will need to work hard. Advice if you stick with PHP: Get the Zend's PHP and ZF certificates. Apply for job after that. You won't be jobless in next 5 years, and you can expect quite a good salary.
I'd love to hear Mark Zuckerberg reply to this.
I find it interesting that Facebook preferred rewriting the entire PHP interpreter to make code execute faster, rather than use another language. Also, if I'm not mistaken, the very initial versions of Facebook were written mostly in Perl, so it's not like Zuckerberg was stuck with PHP since day 1.
http://books.google.ca/books?id=RRUkLhyGZVgC&lpg=PA34&ots=LR...
What I'd done different if i were starting the last one now? I'd not start on ruby, and would have went directly to php.
Btw, I'm starting one now in elixir. Cross fingers.
Never fear, some the nastiest, unmaintainable code I've ever seen is written in Rails. There is a conspiracy of silence among the Rails gurus that is utterly dishonest. Your self-doubt plays into their hands. Just watch, 10 years or less from now, all the mature programmers will confess what utter folly their "Rails Period" was now that they moved on to Programming Language Awesome 4.6
Please name these "Rails gurus". 100% of the experienced Rails developers whose blogs I follow have complained about old Rails code bases they've worked on or have encountered.
Thank you people! My lesson: I will stick with PHP and learn more about organization, architecture and best practices. And Composer and PSR.
I would recommend playing around with some other technology though, not so you can move to greener pastures but to just get a taste of what else is out there. Front-end stuff like Angular and Ember (which require some knowledge of HTML/CSS and JS, which as a PHP guy I bet you would have). Tools like these may slowly make backend technology less differentiated on the small to medium scale as time goes on, so you can't go wrong with investing time in frameworks like these.
Coming from PHP, and probably knowing some JS, have a bit of a look at Node (and Express, to get started), the concurrency model is different enough from PHP. Or even have a look at (gasp) ASP.NET MVC. I don't think that tech gets enough love these days. Try using Heroku with Rails and then go and try and use .NET with Azure. You'll be surprised at how much more responsive Azure is by comparison and you'll be enamored with the tight tool integration.
Either way, there's nothing to worry about. There'll still be heaps of PHP apps to maintain in your lifetime. It might make it harder for you to jump into some fancy new start up, but if you don't wear a cap backwards and have skinny jeans you wont get a job with the cool kids anyway.
Set aside a couple of hours a week to explore some alternatives and see how you feel within 3 months.
I've done some dreadful things in PHP. And Java. And Python. And C. And more.. The problem has never been the language, but rather the software's organization and architecture (or the lack thereof). You can make mistakes in any language, some just make it a little easier for you. Such as PHP's notorious ability to mix code and HTML in the same file... the horror! Before contemplating a language change, you might want…
I started with PHP as a teenager, and ended up coding PHP professionally for about 6 years. I'm certainly not sorry for it (: I haven't touched PHP in a few years (C# and Python for work now) and since really groking a other few languages I've come to the conclusion that, IMO, PHP manages to combine some of the worst aspects of dynamic and static typing to produce an ugly, confused language with gotchas that still ha…