You might have heard this often - Most Popular CMS sites like WordPress, Joomla etc use PHP as their core programming language. And most popular websites with high active users like Facebook, Wikipedia also uses PHP language. There has been a recent debate going on that PHP is dead because of the burgeoning technology. Interestingly, the usage of PHP is higher than Java and other popular programming languages. In late 2016, Python looked very likely to take over PHP but even that it did not happen either. PHP might have lost its popularity recently, but its sealike community still looks more lively than ever. Still, there are international PHP conferences are being held in all parts of the world including Brazil, Japan, Germany, China, US and Ukraine.
So this clearly shows that PHP is not dead yet. To bolster this statement, we would like to point out that PHP is dead only if you ignore the PHP usage statistics. PHP may not be modern programming or scripting language. But this doesn't mean it is dead or outdated to today's standards. It is worth noticing that PHP twitter account still over 65 thousand followers and PHP has active subreddit with 105 thousand active members with umpteen active threads every day about IDEs, frameworks and other related news and topics. According to recent IEEE's Spectrum report, PHP has secured the 13th rank right above Assembly and below HTML & CSS.
If you're a student and still confused about learning PHP course, then we would like you to know that in RedMonk's Programming Language ranking, PHP is ranked at 4th position which was conducted in July 2019. Many reports show that PHP, a server side programming language, is still being used by almost 80% websites on the internet. This is further categorized by PHP versions as