[maratd]

> I don't think anyone who knows anything else would ever choose PHP for a fun personal project.

I would. For every job, a proper tool. If my project is client-side heavy and only needs a thin layer between the client-side and the database, I'll pick PHP. The code I would write in PHP would be minimal and I would get it up and running very quickly.

If I'm writing something substantial on the server-side, then yeah, you may want to consider something else.