One of the things I do when bored is look at the “hot questions” on Stack Exchange. One of these questions, on the Computer Science Stack Exchange, was about what a CS graduate needs to learn to make themselves hireable as a programmer. Most of the responses were for things we don’t look for in our junior hires. It’s nice if they know them but we don’t even tend to put them on our job ads.

There’s a somewhat prevalent notion in some circles that PHP is a bad language and everyone that uses it is some sort of idiot that wouldn’t recognise a real programming language if it compiled to Javascript right in front of their nose. What a real programming language is varies greatly depending on what person you ask (it usually involves things that are specific to their preferred language), but there’s a lot of people that say PHP isn’t one.