[thefounder]

I think php should have stopped at php4 or php5 and maybe just develop a new/sane standard library.

And a new language could have been developed , call it hack or whatever Facebook tried. Anyway I remember php coding gave me headaches. Tried it again 2 years ago and found out the same kind of issues(outdated /inexistent documentation, different ways to do the same thing that actually didn’t work and stuff like that). Try to connect to sql database using ssl and see what I mean.

I see no reason to learn PHP anymore or start up your company using php. We live in a vps/docker age. The advantage of php hosts everywhere has been lost.

[hu3]

Without specifics it's hard to understand what kind of difficulties you had.

But PHP is still so strong because it offers much more than "easy hosting".

What I personaly love most is the instant save file->see results feedback loop. There's no perceptible compilation step. Meanwhile my Java project takes a minute to compile.

Also the shared-nothing model by default is powerful and rare.

Laravel is probably the most well documented frameworks even comparing frameworks from other languages. And symfony, also a PHP framework, is not far from that.

When you say "SSL" I can only think your reasoning is based on outdated information since no one calls it SSL anymore. It's TLS for some years now. And I have been connecting to databases using PHP TLS/SSL since version 5. For almost a decade now.