[slang800]

I stopped writing PHP around 2014.

I don't know if this is still true, but the impression I got at the time was that PHP is constantly trying to catch up with more advanced languages. There was no case I could point to and say "PHP is the best choice for this".

If I want to write a highly concurrent distributed system I'll reach for Elixir/OTP. If I want high performance, I'll reach for C or Rust. If I'm working on a data science project, I'll reach for Python or R. When is PHP the language to go to?

[deleugpn]

When what you need is just to build a web product.

[slang800]

I think the general "web product building" space is even more competitive with tons of good choices.

You've got Ruby on Rails and Elixir/Phoenix which both have an enjoyable developer experience and a well designed language.

There's JavaScript & Node.js where the language is a bit of a mess but the ecosystem is huge. Plus the same language can be used on the frontend and backend.

Python is extremely popular with Django, FastAPI, and Flask.

C# is also extremely popular with ASP.NET Core, although I've never used it.

[marcosdumay]

Did it catch-up with Python? Because last time I saw, it was clearly behind.

(Next time I try web CRUD, I'll try it in Haskell. It seems to have let the more traditional languages behind.)

[Giorgi]

you are missing the point, all the shared webhosts out there support PHP+Apache+mySQL iterations, nobody is deploying python on dedicated server just because they wanted small web app.

[slang800]

There are plenty of shared webhosts that let you run whatever language you want. Fly.io, Render.com, Heroku, etc. They all let me run my code on a fraction of a dedicated server with fully managed infrastructure for a few dollars a month.

[marcosdumay]

Oh, I haven't heard that one since the 00's.

[rdevsrex]

There are so many things today that can do that. Lot's of server rendered js apps are rocking in this space to.