The Perils of PHP

I had an initial assessment with a large company recently. A global financial corporation who advertised their in house "coding academy" or similar. The role was for very junior level devs as it included a few years' of serious training within the company itself.
The wording of the job advert was - and I explicitly checked this - "you should have a base knowledge of coding in any language".

They send you a standard Hackerrank test; it comes with a generic Hackerrank sample test. I did the sample test - it offered the full gamut of languages supported by hr. [I don't know if that's standard abbreviation for Hackerrank but it'll save me typing that out a million times here, so go with it.] I took the test in PHP and it was very straightforward.

Now, perhaps my error was at this point. Perhaps I should have done it in the Javascript setting hr offers - which is Node.js. I have been taught some vanilla Javascript, and for the kind of problems hr provide it would have worked fine. I was put off by the block of code provided in the Node.js option - I haven't yet dealt with Node at all, and didn't know what this chunk of code was representing in the hr environment.

Still, I double checked the job ad and the email I'd received inviting me to test. "Any language", and no note in the email to say the languages would be restricted from the hr standard.

Well, you guessed it. They knocked about 30% of the available languages off for the company's actual test; and PHP was one of the ones to go. I lost a half hour working out how to get my FizzBuzz (which took all of 3 minutes) to output in Node and considered giving it up as a lost cause, but did eventually get it sorted. Annoyingly I then had a time shortage and questions 2 and 3 got pseudocoded and no more than that.

I'm under no illusions about how my result will be scored; if the code doesn't pass the hr test cases, it doesn't matter what happened, you don't get the points.

At the start of the test I was assured I would have a chance to give feedback at the end. Maybe they sensed my mood because I didn't ever get to a feedback screen; just the company's global homepage. Insult to injury...

I'm irritated by the way the whole thing was presented, and I'm irritated that my "base knowledge in any language" didn't actually help me here when any language didn't mean that. However, if nothing else, it was very good practice.

More so, I am wondering just how out of favour PHP is if it's not even in the top 15 language choices for entry level assessments like this. I understand that I've learned it within my course for more than the obvious reasons; I've learned it in a way that will help me learn other programming languages in the future.

My question is - should that future start right now? Is this likely to be the case on most generic assessments? Shall I set myself to learn Python before I even consider applying to a grad scheme elsewhere? What is the general opinion on PHP - is it dying out?