[dabernathy89]

Have you looked at the PHP landscape over the past few years? You may still not love the syntax, but PHP as a language, an ecosystem, and a developer community is extremely strong. It's a fantastic choice for a web app in 2016.

[marcosdumay]

Honestly, no, I haven't look at it in the last 7 years. (It's being that great! Thanks for lighting-up my day.)

Also honestly, I don't think I should look now. The PHP applications I see around are still the ones getting serious vulnerabilities found every week, the same ones that other communities found ways to pack the solutions into tools and conventions that are easier to use than not to. I also don't see anybody claiming PHP has any new template system to replace the dated original one.

I've seen some progress on the language, but not nearly enough to make it compelling. I have plenty of stuff already on my ToTry list, PHP would have to say something better than "I'm not a complete mess anymore" to enter it.

[dabernathy89]

You can of course choose to still avoid it - but your advice to other devs to do the same makes little sense. It's a completely different beast than it was 7 years ago.

[marcosdumay]

Do you know of any compelling reason, instead of problem fixes?

Because the language is a bit archaic (has maintainability problems for large codebases, has the "too little power" problem for small codebases); as far as I have looked, the ecosystem still does not include a good templating system (although it does include most of the tools available on other web ecosystems); and the community is still heavy on applications with the same kinds of security bugs they always had, and many, many "X-only" developers.

And, anyway, fixing those outstanding problems can only make it an ordinary language. And there's no reason to look at any language that the best claim is "it's not worse than any other random language".