[gremlinsinc]

Sure, but PHP's got it's shit together lately. It's actually grown w/ the times and isn't the POS it was a decade ago w/ the 4/5 versions. 7 and soon version 8 are a lot faster, more secure, and w/ composer/laravel and the ecosystem a lot easier to build apps in. That said it's not always perfect. There's definitely something to be said of building the entire stack in JS simply because then devs only need know JS... Or use something like elixir because of performance needs.

I think hating on PERL is more of a meme than hating on PHP, and in some circles hating on JS is just as popular a meme... I mean JS is a nightmare sometimes esp. the tooling/build setups but it accomplishes things not many other languages can. Though rust+web assembly might be interesting way to skip js, but learning curve is a bit high on rust.