I started programming in PHP circa 2001 because it was much more deployable than other languages.<p>(i.e. in the early 2000&#x27;s you saw software reuse in the sense that there were apps like Wordpress and Drupal based on PHP,  whereas in Java you had frameworks like Spring.  My theory was if you wanted to create something impactful,  PHP was the place to be.)<p>I wound up developing systems circa 2008 that were no longer appropriate for PHP, that is,  most of these had a huge configuration base that had to be loaded each time you viewed a page,  at the time I realized Java performance-wise would have been the right idea,  but I had a big investment in PHP.<p>Around the time I had a day job programming C# then I got paid for two years to build Java systems on other people&#x27;s account and it helped me get up to speed on Maven,  Spring and all that jazz.<p>Frankly I don&#x27;t know if anybody wants to build new PHP systems in 2016,  but there has got to be an unlimited number of legacy systems that people want to keep alive and will never find the courage to shoot behind the woodshed.