It's disappointing that PHP still gets hate in 2024. PHP of 2024 isn't the PHP of 2004. As someone with a bunch of experience in Java, C, C++, Python, PHP, Hack, Javascript and a handful of others, PHP is (IMHO) almost a perfect language for serving HTTP requests because of these characteristics:<p>1. Essentially an HTML document is a valid PHP program. This is an excellent starting point for beginners;<p>2. PHP has a stateless API that means there's basically zero start up cost, unlike, say, loading libraries like you do in Java or even Python;<p>3. There's no threading within the context of a request. This is what you want 99.99% of the time. Hack extended this with cooperative async/await;<p>4. Because of (3) everything you allocate/use within a request context just gets thrown away. There's no persistent state (eg like Java's servlet model). Again, this is almost ideal;<p>5. Because of all the above, PHP hosting is incredibly cheap and accessible.<p>The two things I'd probably add to PHP come from Hack: a modern type system with nullable support and the collections (vec, map, set).