I used to work way back in the day on PHP too, but even though I'm sure this will be downvoted, …

Sorry to be dismissive, but elegance, expressiveness or succinctness are not mandatory for "making things". Gatekeeping a programming language on esthetics is quite shallow in my opinion. Ease of use and deployment, breadth, availability, low cost of maintaining, are sometimes more important, and PHP offers plenty of value in these respects. I don't want to work with it, but I will never presume to look down on people that do. PHP has been a cornerstone for a whole generation of programmers and I think the current web-development ecosystem would not be where it is without it.

I might be misinterpreting "taken seriously" with utility, but to me it is very valuable that a PHP script can just be dropped on almost any web server and it can start doing stuff, and that alone is reason enough not to not dismiss it.

I’ve made a few “serious” projects with PHP and has been great, I never feel like I’m fighting against it to do what I need to do, the code can be very concise, its very fast and has a lot of batteries builtin. Python is not beautifully well thought out, the syntax is awful and the version conflicts make it a mess. Your comparing to React which is not a language or in the same domain is confusing and makes me doubt your credibility.

> and people who don't know any better keep championing it Experienced developers understand that there are different tools for different jobs. They also understand that languages are not successful for 30 years without providing some legitimate value.

Someone who worked with Python / Django and JAVA / Spring for years professionally, I see PHP / Laravel as absolute superior way to build web apps, especially if you are in a team and people might come and go.

I agree with all of those points, except that it does have one thing going for it - it is easy for end-users to deploy PHP apps: FTP your files onto any random cheapo shared web-host, done. I’m amazed that it’s been so long and no other language comes close to that :(

> I used to work way back in the day on PHP too, This is your issue - PHP < 5.3 is very different to PHP 7+. Not just at the language level - but the community, frameworks and best practices too. No more random scattering of SQL statements in HTML files! Modern PHP (with a framework like Laravel or Symfony) is probably one of the most productive ways to build web applications. > It's not beautifully well thought-out the way Python is. This is definitely an interesting take... Python hasn't even solved package management yet. And the 2.7 => 3 migration is probably the most famous example of making a mess of an ecosystem with backwards incompatible changes. In contrast PHP has Composer and 5.3 code is pretty much compatible with 8.0 (although ideally all code from the 5.3 era should be burned at the stake). > and people who don't know any better keep championing it. I think people do event…

we should show this comment to facebook that uses hack (php originated lang) in millions of files to run their little website and infrastructure. php isn't bad. just got a bad rep. many langs got quirks. some more than others. but php has more web production success story and usage than most.