[wwweston]

I might even go so far as to say that the contention isn't true. In fact, these days I tend to assume the word "modern" is a developer thought-smell. Unless its user can explain what they mean by modern, it's best to assume it's a set of personal aesthetics informed largely by available fashions/habits in the first half decade of a developer's career (which can be fine, it's just the term modern carries waaay more weight than it should).

( -smell can also be a thought-smell, but that's another discussion.)

I'd guess the author means "modern languages have a reasonably simple concurrency paradigm supported by language or standard library primitives," which would be about the only reason other than the interest in the task itself I can imagine reimplementing PHP in Go. I wouldn't buy that definition myself (and as the parent says, it's less clear whether it's the right fit for PHP) but it's a place to start in addressing the relative merits the project might actually be claiming.