j You don't need Mono any more, Microsoft have a new framework (.NET Core) that's cross platform. You don't need Windows for development either, it works very well with Visual Studio Code on MacOS and Linux too. :)

I'm surprised you didn't include ASP.NET Core's server (Kestrel) in your benchmarks, as it tends to be one of the faster servers (eg. see TechEmpower's benchmarks: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/)

long-time PHP developers who still refuse to use PDO or choose the pointless mysqli_ function wrappers As a side note, there's several features that MySQLi supports that PDO doesn't, so in some cases there's a reasonable reason to avoid using PDO. One difference that I can think of is that MySQLi uses real prepared statements, whereas PDO emulates it by replacing the variables in PHP (as opposed to doing it in the database engine). PDO is designed to support multiple different DB engines, so by definition it doesn't support many MySQL-specific features. Having said that, PDO is usually the better choice.

I've never used Go as a developer, but as an end-user it's fantastic as many Go apps are available as standalone statically-linked executables. Makes it much easier to install and maintain than something like a Ruby or Node.js app.

The lack of a good standard core library, large number of oddities in the language (like == vs ===), the complex ecosystem with tools such as Babel and Webpack, and the fact that there's many ways of doing the same thing makes JavaScript less than ideal for new developers. IMO, it's better to start with a more complete language like Python or C# that just works out-of-the-box.

It's not just PHP - Many other languages have the same behaviour as PHP: Single quotes do not expand variables, whereas double quotes do. Shell scripts behave this way too. Also in some other languages (at least Java and C#), single quotes are used for characters whereas double quotes are used for strings.