[spockz]

The latest version of PHP that I used was 5.3. The power, and disadvantage, was that it was basically a scripting language which allowed for quick prototyping and easily making some of a site dynamic and allowing for templating. For the more serious/involved/enterprise applications, a lot of workarounds were needed to cache database connections etc.

Lots has improved: ide support, jit, package manager. In doing so it became more mature now joining the realm of more serious, enterprise, languages which had all of this for ages. As such it is also being compared against those languages. At the same time templating is now easier and more cheaply done through static site generators. So imho PHP falls a bit in the middle and it is only kept afloat because of the likes of Magento, Wordpress, and other big products built on top of PHP that thrive by being modifiable by practically any developer.