PHP is amazing
If you’re thinking of PHP version less than 8 you need to have another look
Totally stateless. Uncached server side rendered response times in double digit milliseconds.
Types
Extremely battle, highly tested frameworks.
Excellent tooling for tdd, bdd, static analysis, automated browser testing, coding standards and auto fixing. Even fully automated refactoring for things like package upgrades (Rector)
Regular, solid, releases bringing updates and fixes
Arguably one of the best package management systems, Composer. And only one, none of this constantly changing tooling that some other ecosystems seem to do
Properly open source platforms to power all kinds of web projects from e-commerce, CRM, social, scraping, analytics, monitoring, API, CMS, blogging
Basically if your target is server side web stuff then it’s really good
Or, you can continue to demonstrate how out of touch you are by continuing with the old “PHP bad” jokes if you want!
Uncached server side rendered response times in double digit milliseconds.
Thirst thought, that sounds slow. But for the use case of delivering html over the Internet it is fast enough.
For a bit of templating? Yes! What drives response times up is typically the database or some RPC, both of which are out of control of PHP, so I assume these were not factored in (because PHP can’t win anything there in a comparison).