I like to follow up on Why You should learn PHP by rumblinglankan.com which talks about PHP for bloggers and extend it for programmers in general.
I was a full blown Java developer back in the day. I knew many developers who stuck to their guns and did one thing like Oracle, Java or .NET and said it would never go away and there would always be a market for it.
Well things change. Windows administrators are learning Linux, VB6 guys probably moved to VB.NET etc. If you sit still your skills will become obsolete.
A few years ago I saw the potential of PHP. It was simple to learn widely deployed on the Internet. I started building some Intranets with it, thinking I can move some of that logic out to a website later.
That was back in 2005. Now more than 50% of my work day is PHP, MySql, drupal, Code Igniter, WordPress or something other than Java. If I locked myself into Java I wouldn’t have got most of the projects or opportunities I got.
Now I use PHP from writing system scripts to extending drupal. I’m also thinking about trying PHP GTK to write a Windows GUI application.
Look around and try something. Software is always changing, try to keep up. 
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interesting. i started life as a PHP engineer and was thinking of catchin up on Java (or .NET even, eughh..) to get into the ‘real world’.
I didn’t mean Java was bad. Just to keep an eye out. PHP to Java is a good progression. I don’t know much about .NET.
I tried both .NET and JAVA, bit more on ASP.NET
but I never felt strong on those like PHP
PHP is pretty straight forward and can do almost anything in da web
PHP GTK – hope to learn it too, but no time at da moment
I find it strange not to see a sri lankan php forum, or did I miss one in da web??
Long Live PHP, hehehe
Kusal
Kusal, there is w3lk a group of web designers and web developers
http://groups.google.com/group/w3lk
you are welcome to join. No phplk? No problem I will set one up.
http://groups.google.com/group/phplk
done. Good idea.
groups are good, but I was looking for a full featured forum which is powered by a Invision board(IP.Board) or something like that. I know there are lot of forums like that (phpfreaks,devnet) yet they lack Sri Lanka passion and feel
most people go for .net bcoz they think that its easy and have lot of jobs, no one really look into php thinking that its hard or thinks thats there are no jobs, which is not really true. most ppl fall into VS IDE and thinks it has everything. I think everyone should try everything(atleast 3) and choose what best suite him/her rather just falling to basic appearance.
Ya email lists are old school. Lets see about setting up a web forum as well.