Good post.

I think most developers hate PHP because they last time they worked with it was back in V4 land on a website that developed by someone who had no knowledge of how to program a website. The fact they came up with something that kinda worked is a testament to how easy PHP is to use.

PHP 8.1 (and soon 8.2) is a very advanced language from V4 days. While not perfect, it prefer it to any other language for web development.

As for the standard reasons to hate PHP, I would remind people you can code security issues in any language, Packagist.org has plenty of great packages available, and while some built in functions are not ideal, PHP as a language has some of the best documentation available, much better than most, including Microsoft created languages, and that is saying a lot.

But if you want a real reason to not use a compiled or minimized language for web development, you should read my post on supply chain issues. Attack of the 50 Mile Wide Open Source Supply Chain Watch out for item 6!

Great list, I think PHP is a simple language, that has also evolved and improved over time. You can run it on both Windows and Linux, so it's cross platform. Also a minumental array of software is running on PHP. It's also great as an entry language for beginners.

For me, point 2 in particular is decisive. Many webhosters in Germany only offer PHP. NodeJS is still rocket physics here. I would love to switch and build cooler things, but Germany is putting a spoke in my wheel here.

Great post!