[mercer]

Sorry, but that's just silly.

I might agree that PHP is a poor choice in many ways, and that in many situations there's a much better alternative. But it's quite another thing to claim it's "objectively" a poor choice.

I have clients on small budgets who run on shared hosting, and the fact that these support PHP is enough reason to use it. I have clients whose needs are met almost perfectly by Wordpress, and using it requires using PHP. I know developers who have fairly successful small businesses on PHP and for them it would be "objectively" a bad idea to just drop all their knowledge and everything they've built so far in favor of an "objectively" better language.

Even just the fact that in some places or for some use cases it's significantly easier and cheaper to get an decent PHP developer than anything else is a reason to use PHP for some things.