[phlogisticfugu]

the old language that's a bit of a counter example to this is php.

folks came out with a package manager in composer that was just so much better that everyone jumped to it. and then the IDE's finally got modern features, and then the runtime got much faster in php 7.

It's just by the time all this happened, "PHP sucks" had become"common knowledge" and it really fell off the popularity ladder. but not for lack of tooling.

C++ has also made a lot of strides in developer productivity, it just still has a bad rep.

[Shish2k]

Does PHP have a debugger which doesn’t totally cripple performance just by being installed yet?

[tored]

xdebug 3 has been released with great performance improvements.

https://php.watch/articles/xdebug2-vs-3-benchmark

And you actually can have xdebug installed without performance degradation if it is not automatically enabled on every request (think that was true for xdebug 2 as well). What you do is to send a special request payload to enable it when needed, can be done with a browser extension.

There is also phpdbg, shipped with php, it does not suffer from the same performance penalties that xdebug prior to version 3 had (not sure how it compares to xdebug 3). However it is a command line debugger only, it does not support remote debugging or IDE integration.

https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/WI-21414