There's a lot of PHP positivity in the comments. I just want to inject some sobering pessimism in here, as someone who has spent the last 6 months using PHP for the $dayjob, and used to do commercial PHP work back in the PHP5 days.<p>PHP ....<p>... Doesn't ship with a production ready webserver. Yes, Python and Ruby also don't, but they have easy tools you can reach for (gunicorn, Puma) if you need to run them in a modern deployment stack where a whole nginx isn't really necessary.<p>... Doesn't have basic collection types in the core language. It's 2019 and PHP still thinks it's logical for the standard language to throw all Map, Set, List semantics into a single PHP array type. You can install the "phpds" native extension (and polyfill it from Composer) to get some passably usable implementations. But coming from Golang / Rust (or hell, even ES2015) I find them frustratingly limited.<p>... Doesn't have any sort of threading / async support. Even in a modest-scale webapp, this is going to hurt you when you want to do things like deploy PHP as a job queue handler. Or fan out even a trivial number of HTTP-client API calls from a PHP controller in a microservice-y world. The latter can be sort-of achieved with naive hacks like the cURL client concurrency support (Symfony HTTP-client supports it: <a href="https://symfony.com/doc/current/components/http_client.html#concurrent-requests" rel="nofollow">https://symfony.com/doc/current/components/http_client.html#...</a>) but that's a hack at best.<p>... Doesn't ship with a debugger out of the box. Even with great tooling like phpstorm IDE, you have to actually rub braincells together to be able to get xdebug installed / configured and ready to use.<p>... Has a somewhat decent package manager (Composer). But it doesn't ship with the language. Also, it's kinda crappy. It's painfully slow to do a composer install/update on anything larger than a toy project. It has all sorts of weird non-determinism issues (the composer.lock file flails around wildly between runs, changing case of metadata fields, etc).<p>... Has semi-decent static analysis tools (Psalm, phpstan), but they're pretty garbage compared to a proper compiler, or the quality of static analysis tools in other dynamic languages like Ruby / Javascript.<p>I could keep going. Profiling, code formatter, library ecosystem quality, and so on.<p>Where am I going with this? Honestly, I wish PHP would just die. It has some pros, but overall it's a terrible language that has no hope of modernizing enough to be relevant in 2019 and beyond. There's plenty of other excellent languages that do a better job in any category that PHP attempts to be good at. The effort being spent to maintain PHP as a language/runtime could be better spent on other languages that have made better choices in language design.<p>The developers who have become proficient in PHP, should continue to use their employable skills to maintain existing PHP codebases, but take a bit of time on the side to get proficient with another popular language if not already. And for the love of god, stop starting greenfields projects in PHP! Let it fade away peacefully.