[29athrowaway]

PHP = a programming language + templating engine.

Most general purpose languages do not have built in templating and do not have templating in their standard library.

As a programming language, many modern languages have a faster and more optimized runtime than PHP. If the Laravel authors ported their framework to Node, Python or Java it would certainly run faster.

As a templating language, it has to run on the server. That means you pay for the computing cost of templating not the end user. Unless you do your templating using a JS solution.

On top of that, you have to transfer a rendered page from your application server instead of just serving files from CDN at a fraction of the cost.

Overall, PHP is the wrong solution for the wrong problem. I used PHP in 2004 and then moved on. The industry at a large also moved on.