[skinnyarms]

Those startups you mention are 15+ years old, would they still choose PHP today?

Maybe you haven't heard of startups failing because of choosing the wrong stack, but I'll wager you don't hear about most startups failing because...why would you? Also, have you heard of startups re-platforming? Either because the current stack is falling apart or the company is acquired by a bigger fish and they need to integrate with other services so parts end up getting rewritten to Java/C#.

The fact is PHP is good for making websites, and that's all you'd really want to do with it. There are other languages that are good at making websites and they are more popular and have other benefits.

If you are building things with PHP and it's working for you, then awesome. But seriously, why encourage it?