Is php still relevant?

>>170134
>Is php the way to go?
>is it still used a lot 2016?
Yes, and yes. PHP is a turd, and you certainly shouldn't learn it as a first language, because it will forever taint your ability to write good code.

But it's the turd everyone's using, so we're going to be stuck with it forever.

Well-known stuff that's written in PHP:

- Wordpress
- Facebook


>I'm not looking for anything specific, just something help me understand 'webdesign structure' better.
You sound like a design guy. You'd be much better off installing wordpress and learning how to deploy it to client requirements. Eventually you can learn enough JS and PHP to write Wordpress extensions, but if you "Recently learned css & html", programming is never going to be your core competency.

>>170137
Thanks for tips!
>programming is never going to be your core competency
That's fine. I still want to delve deeper into the subject though. Is mastering wordpress (+ext) the only thing you need to do whatever you want web wise though?

>>170145
JS would be useful too. It runs on the client side and it's the stuff that makes all the shit move around the screen in modern websites. Javascript has been around for decades, but now it's called "HTML5" which means it's new and cool again.

Unless you actually like programming, there's not really a huge amount of point to any of this. You can be 10-100 times more productive banging Wordpress plugins together than you can writing your own stuff from scratch.

And the people that actually pay for web work don't really realise this, because so much shit on the web is reusable and reused. You write your own dooberries, the first thing they compare them to is Amazon, Google, Wordpress, Wikipedia; all sites that have had decades of development and whose cost-estimates exceed $5,000,000.

Far better to use frameworks someone's already spent millions of dollars on*, and then only write the parts you absolutely can't buy in or get for free.


* https://www.openhub.net/p/wordpress/estimated_cost

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>>170151
Thanks for the response!
If I can have your opinion on those who do enjoy 'programming in general', what ladder languages should they learn?

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>>170174
Start off with something high-level that will teach you programming, such as Python, Java, C# or JS.

Languages are supersets of each other when it comes to what you can do with them. This means that the lower-level the language you start with, the more difficulty you'll have getting any benefit from higher-level languages. You simply won't see the point in the features that make the language more useful than the one you started with, unless you make a conscious effort to unlearn a bunch of stuff*. You'll end up writing low-level code, and wondering what the big deal is.

Conversely, moving to a lower-level language is just a case of business-as-usual, except you don't get to use X, or the language doesn't do Y for you.

You really, really should start off with a modern language that can do high-level things such as Object Orientation, Functional Programming, Lambda Functions, Regular Expressions, and so on. If you later end up having to use C or PHP, you can always find or write an implementation of the stuff you otherwise wouldn't even have known you needed.

PHP is a terrible language to start off with, because nothing makes sense, nothing is consistent, and the development environment is horrible**. Learn to program, then move to PHP.

I'd personally suggest getting hold of Head First Python , and working through it. Seriously: all the books in the series only work if you actually do the exercises. Head First Design Patterns is also good: it's not for any particular OO language, and it will make you a better programmer by showing you how to better address the big picture.

* This is called the "Blub Paradox"
** PHP: A Fractal of Bad Design captures a lot of PHP's horribleness
There used to be helpful URLs in this post, but I can't be arsed fighting with the spam filter.

>>170181
Awesome! So after you get the fundamentals down of a high-level language should you focus in
on that 'specific' language and master it, or is it better to focus on get a wider scope of the
differences/fundamentals of other high-level programming languages?

>>170208
Once you've nailed a particular paradigm, there's no difference between languages you know and languages you don't know, other than the speed with which you can churn out code in them. Within the same paradigm, you're fundamentally doing the same thing; the only differences are the precise syntax you have to use and what libraries are available to you.

If someone tells you "Oh, you absolutely mustn't learn <Z>, you must learn <X>, because <X> has <Y>", then they are a hack, and they themselves don't know how to learn languages, and found their first one so hard they can't even conceive that you might know dozens. If feature <Y> is cool, you can learn it on its own, in any language that implements it.

Java, JS, C++, C#, Objective C, PHP and Python are OO languages. If you know OO, you should be able to read and understand a program written in any of them, and you'll also understand C and VB, because Imperative is a lower-level subset of OO. (that said, PHP is a horrible language, and you'll have a much easier time learning one that makes sense).

So if you know OO, then you're sorted for a whole heap of languages, and the only difference between you and someone who's been doing it for years is that he knows the libraries and you don't (you can pick up the peculiar syntax of almost any language in an hour tops).

This is a big difference, though. An experienced programmer is 10-100 times faster than some guy learning the APIs from the help pages. He can literally outperform several of his colleagues put together.

>>170218
Thanks for all the help & insight!
I haven't had the chance to delve into php and hopefully html/css has tarnished my mind too
much to get into a OO language.

>>170225
HTML isn't even programming. It's structured data, like JSON or RTF.

Seriously, check out the Head First books. They're really good. I believe they're also available in PDF.