PHP is IMHO the most productive and easiest platform for web development:
- a request
- a response
- templating
- no shared stated
And that's it! But the language syntax has so many quirks. So it's cool if Hack redesign the language and make it more beautiful and consistent. Many developers switch to Ruby or Python because these languages are better designed. I think Hack could attract a lot of these developers who want more beauty in the tools they use.
That's called the Web. :-/
Have a look at Python & Flask! There is nothing easier than that!
The Slack article posted elsewhere in these comments https://slack.engineering/taking-php-seriously-cf7a60065329 has some excellent arguments about why PHP's approach is different in interesting ways.
What? PHP is significantly easier to roll out for your beginner/intermediate junior developer on a VPS. There isn't any comparison.
This comes from someone who leans on Python hard for ML work / scraping / signal processing (what it was born to do) and PHP for web development (what IT was born to do).