Hacker News Reader

This begs the question, if you want something like PHP why not just use PHP7? Is the stigma that strong?

Python is the typical recommendation I see for beginner and able to use on Web.

Anything interpeted (Node, Python, Ruby) but PHPs model is pretty unique. It loads a page and starts running code in it, possibly loading other code and other pages. With the other languages you usually run some code first and eventually generates the page. The result is the same but the infrastructure is very different.

The only similar thing I used was asp pages. Are they still a thing?

Hack, if being a fork of PHP counts as "not PHP."

Python, JS/Node, or ASP.Net/C# would be my suggestions. Each have their pluses and minuses.

I would say Python