Nowadays, you will find lots of other programming languages out there. A different language has a different purpose. Some are good for web application development, and some are for mobile or other devices applications.
It’s tough to make a discission which one to choose, especially for beginners.
But if you want to start learning web development, PHP would be an excellent language for you to choose as a newcomer. Many beginners find it effortless and get started with it. You may hear that PHP is still used by many schools, teachers, and academics worldwide.
If you want to know why PHP is so popular and called a beginner-friendly language, read the whole article.
Without further talking, Let’s find out why PHP is so popular and called beginner-friendly.
Open-source
PHP is a widely used open-source general-purpose scripting language, which is mostly used for developing web applications.
MySQL is also free for everyone. You can develop a dynamic website or fully functional CMS only using PHP and MySQL within few hours.
Low Learning Curve
PHP has a very low learning curve, so new programmers can at least build a dynamic website using it very quickly.
Moreover, it was the first programming language that supports dynamic content generation.
Availability of Frameworks
PHP offers few rich frameworks. With these frameworks, you can build almost any system you want. And learning any one of these frameworks is not that hard.
If you search on Google, you will find various PHP frameworks like Laravel, CodeIgniter, Symfony, CakePHP, etc. All of these are free to use.
Vast Community and Support
PHP has a huge growing community of professionals and experts willing to support beginners and others and helping others. Experts are answering the latest problems.
So if you need any help while learning or developing your application using PHP, you can get help from other experts, or you can find your answer that has been already answered in the StackOverflow. It would be a great experience.
Modern Package and Enormous Library
You can use other packages and libraries using composer, which is very similar to the npm (Node package manager).
Conclusion
These are not the only reasons. There are lots of other reasons which you will find PHP as a beginner-friendly language.
And PHP is not the most popular language. Languages like JavaScript, Python, Java, C# are usually counted higher on a ranking of the most widely-used languages.
But if you eliminate those popular compiled languages from the rankings, PHP is generally the most popular scripting language.