Is PHP a dying language[2020]?

PHP (or PHP Hypertext Preprocessor) is a server-side scripting language that is used to create dynamic web pages that can interact with databases. It is a widely-used open-source language that is specifically used for web application development and can be embedded within HTML.

Surely the list will increase in the future. PHP is being constantly upgrading to the next level and its performance is really increasing these days. People used to call PHP as the worst language because of its poor performance and lack of API and capabilities. But these are things of past not of today. Today PHP is much powerful like any other. According to extensive and reliable web technology surveys, the share of PHP as Server Side Language is more than 80%​

This thing clearly shows that majority is using PHP. One reason for this could be an easy syntax. You will not have a hard time learning PHP. Also WAMP, MAMP, LAMP had their part in growing usage of PHP. Today these three are available in packages and you could have them running in your system in minutes. More importantly, the evolution of coding standards and frameworks for PHP has made the coding more easy, manageable. Most of the big top sites do not rely on a single language. So I suggest you that don't look for top sites that have made with the language you want to learn instead of go for the number of people using it and how powerful it is.

Although I find that number of people using PHP is decreasing these days. But still, you will find huge resources to do anything in PHP.

                    

Moreover, anything you learn in PHP will never be wasted because you are just selecting PHP to learn to code, making algorithms, solving a problem, approaching OOP style, etc. which are common and necessary for every language.
And yes I may be made it off topic but I really feel that language like PHP deserves it ;)

Are you wondering if you are wasting your time if you spend a few months learning PHP? You are not wasting your time, at all. PHP is a C based language, so if you are good with PHP you can easily grasp a lot of other languages, so you would not be wasting your time.

WordPress, just on its own is running something like 60% of all the websites out there, could be more when you consider intranets and so on. So when something is being used on that many sites, no, it is not dying. Out of e-commerce sites online, a huge majority uses PHP based sites.

So, no. PHP is not dying any more than a screwdriver for an electrician or a hammer is for a carpenter, they just think of it as a tool. PHP is not receiving a lot of love out there, not even from me. But languages just don’t die, not when they are used by millions of people. Just because a language does not make headlines, the mainstream does not sell, you can’t clickbait a PHP article, because everyone knows PHP.

Then you have like 30 other CMS systems, all written in PHP used by hundreds of thousands of people, many millions of man/woman hours worked on it, billions of bugs solved. Yeah, PHP might not be hot right now, and probably never will be, again, but like JAVA and many technologies we just take for granted, they are there, they do their jobs. When was the last time you clicked on a clickbait article on the Oracle database? Many years ago? Think Oracle or MySQL databases have gone away? Think again.