[hbogert]

I'm definitely not the fondest user of PHP. There is an extreme gap between the users and the ones being able to develop the language. That gap for example, is a lot smaller in Golang.

Language improvements didn't happen until Hack started being a thing. The performance was a shitshow for 20 years until they got help from Intel engineers. Some of those fixes were extreme low hanging fruit, simple profiler based optimizations -- again, why was this not picked up sooner, imo due to said gap.

Also the community has a severe case of Stockholm syndrome. Always on the extreme defense of the language and the big frameworks (Symfony, laravel). It's a community which shuns other languages and makes fun of Enterprisey Java solutions, yet the average project made in Symfony reminds me of one thing, Java Enterprise projects. The practical difference being they swapped XML for YAML.