[rob74]

Unfortunately the bad design choices from the past are mostly here to stay - I mean, when you have the thing you want to find (the "needle") as the first parameter in about half of your "find something in something else"-type functions and the "haystack" as the first parameter in the other half, are you really going to break backward compatibility just to make things consistent? Of course not! So PHP will never be my favourite language (although I work with it every day), but it gets the job done, so...

Since you mentioned Python: I would never think of using Python instead of PHP, at least not for a web-based project. Performance-wise PHP is (I think) better thanks to all the work Facebook sponsored, and it has all the "batteries" needed for web development included, so the only reason for choosing Python would be that it's maybe more "elegant".

[beberlei]

Clarification: While Facebook sponsored a lot of work it was on their competing HHVM system, which spured other contributors that competed with HHVM (Zend mostly) to invest more in PHP and develop the performance improvements in PHP 7 and 8.

The performance improvements where not directly sponsored by Facebook.