In the first paragraph, this post looked like it was going to go down the path of discussing local optima—once you're skilled with PHP and its toolchain, you have a strong incentive to keep using it.<p>In the past certain events such as the rise of Ruby on Rails made a compelling reason to move, but now PHP has very productive frameworks of its own. Even though a strong case could be made that working in rails is still a bit more productive, PHP is close enough that it's a win in the short term.<p>From the other side, PHP isn't as performant as Java, Node or Go for certain things, but that gap has also narrowed (especially with PHP7). In this case, the biggest returns from switching would appear only after your app has hit a certain scale and at that point switching is harder.<p>This would have been a compelling argument.<p>What the author argued instead was that Heroku, Azure and other hosts were too expensive and $10/month hosting at Laravel Forge locks him into PHP. I don't get that at all, especially coming from a Swede.<p>How much is it worth to learn something like Rails that would give you an edge in building an MVP for a side project? How about learning Node and getting an idea of what so much of the development world is using? If you're living in a wealthy norther European country, is the hosting cost really something that you want to direct what education you'll invest into your career?