[contingencies]

Things I like about PHP: it's not perl, which it replaced for webdev. It's very optimized, and people with fat budgets pay for that (eg. Facebook). It connects to everything. Most of its (useful to webdev type situation) libraries are more mature than the equivalents in other languages, because more people have used them for longer. It had working unicode from the early days. It runs everywhere. Loads of people know enough of it to be dangerous / collaborate, and they tend to be numerous in the young/cheap hire pool. It's pretty much web-oriented, but can do scripting fine as well. It has a relatively stable configuration. Honestly, I think it's a very Unix-like solution to webdev problems, because it lets you roll your own solution, stays out of your way (unless requested), and encourages you to code in higher level languages. Yes, a lot of the code out there is horrible. Yes, most people code on frameworks which replace half the language with ugly hanging half-implemented abstractions. Yes, the function name thing is a pain. But mostly, really always almost mostly, it just works ... quite fast indeed, and everywhere. Yay PHP!

[singingfish]

Ooh, please don't badmouth perl. Modern perl (e.g. https://pragprog.com/book/swperl/modern-perl-fourth-edition ) is a much more sanely designed environment than modern php is.

[contingencies]

I originally wrote a long comment about how I've written CPAN modules and worked professionally in perl but will never do it again, explaining why technical betamax superiority was irrelevant because perl's users left before it got its act together, but I think in hindsight a simpler summary would be this: grep 'man perldsc' ~/.bash_history|wc -l

[singingfish]

each to their own. I'd like to do more stuff in other languages, but my perl skills are in too high demand, and it's fun.