This guy seems like a real open minded person who did his research and shared his opinion after making strong points. /s
- Cheap (almost every cheap/free hosting supports it without any extra config)
- Easy (can other languages beat this out of the box: `$_POST["name"]` ?)
- Wordpress
- Huge market (if you are into bootstrapping your business, there are lots of opportunities and low hanging fruit in PHP)
- Lots of big open source projects to customize or work on top of (nextcloud, etc...)
- Have a product mindsetThere's https://github.com/Scriptor/pharen though
Pros for PHP could be, it's templating capabilities with HTML, easy to use DB interfaces and the entanglement with the web/HTML/web-server in general. Nowadays you don't really write these kinds of apps anymore where your backend returns whole HTML Pages but that doesn't mean it's a bad language.
Of course, this comes at a price. But saying PHP has no pros is quite subjective
I get the feeling the author is either not trying to be objective, or is one of those people who confuses strident opinion for objective fact. "PHP is bad and everyone who uses it is bad" is a meme that some people take seriously... and one that also applied to javascript until Node.js appeared and it became valuable, interestingly enough.
I would say there are no objectively bad languages, just bad code (which can be written in any language), or languages which aren't used in an optimal way, since every one was created with a specific frame of mind and intended use case. PHP serves its purpose, and if someone doesn't want to use it, they can just not use it. Obviously PHP has pros, if it didn't, no one would use it.
(Working with both vanilla PHP and Hack; I find the latter orders of magnitude nicer to work with - just for XHP alone, I wish I could switch my PHP projects to be Hack projects...)