No PHP in the curriculum?

I was looking at the list of links for the Back End Dev. I didn’t see any PHP in the titles. Is it possible to learn back-end development without learning a server-side language like PHP?

Thanks.


But there are still some Wiki articles on PHP.

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FreeCodeCamp is all about using Javascript through the full stack. Quincey has written a lot of articles about this, which you can find on Medium and Quora. Node.js is serverside javascript for example.

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I too would prefer to learn PHP, which is pretty much standard and an included offering on many web hosts, rather than have to pay for a more expensive host to run trendy Node and Mongo.

While JavaScript is very popular, I think that other languages should not be pushed aside for frameworks that in some way take away some learning by not knowing how the frameworks work.

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Well this is going to be a unpopular position but here it is:

You don’t really need to know PHP to run a lamp stack. In fact, unless you are building a custom app, beyond recognizing PHP when you see it. That is because PHP is popular because so many popular applications use it, Wordpress, Drupal…but you don’t need to know PHP to use this software, or even to develop for this software (yes, I know. If you know PHP you can do more. That’s not the point). You can be very successfull with out every writing PHP code. And you can still design webpages, run ecoommerce, blogs, financial, you name it. I can load PHP on a server, and run a site without writing any php code.

That’s just not true with newer technology. To say Node is a just trend is false. It’s well established and growing faster than PHP has in a decade. I do way more coding in node than I have in PHP, and I’ve been a LAMP stack dev in the mid 90s. You are right. Most small businesses and lumbering corporations aren’t going ot want to pay for these servers when they do fine on shared or private server hosting with a lamp stack, but you won’t really need PHP for most of them either.

Bootcamps fill a niche that put out devs faster. Universities only started doing serious web degrees in the last 10 years. And many of those programs have only just caught on to lamp stack. Boot camps are getting devs ready for now, in which other stacks are in demand.

Are there PHP jobs out there. Yes. Are they in growing face paced industries…hardly ever.

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Thank you for your response, and I respect your coding experience.
I was thinking in regard to coding and developing apps with PHP rather than using frameworks and other apps.

Yes, I did write that Node and Mongo are ‘trendy’, but trends can be long-term as well as short-lived, so I wasn’t presenting anything false there.

Anyway, thank you for your insight.

Just going to throw out this still-relevant-after-7-years article. A few of the items mentioned are fixed, but the overall philosophy remains unchanged. All languages have warts (god knows JS has some corkers), but PHP has the distinction of being made almost entirely of warts. I think the phrase “a blight on my craft” is the best summation in there.

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