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I've not worked with PHP for over 8 years now, but I hear it's gotten much better recently.

It still has issues that are commonly associated with hosting provider configuration/control over the runtime, apparently.

(sources are anecdotal; two friends who've had the mental fortitude to stick with the language for so long)

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PHP 7 & 8 introduce lots of improvements. I used PHP 5 when I got into web dev and remember moving to Python as soon as I could. At work I've had to use PHP 7 and have been very pleasantly surprised at how solid it is. Now that I have more experience than my PHP 5 days, it's become apparent that PHP is very clearly suited for web work and the built-in functions offer many conveniences for such work that simply aren't available in other languages (granted other languages weren't built for web like PHP was). I've been surprised by my speed in PHP and I chalk most of that up to many helpful standard library functions. Even though PHP has a lot of old/compat functions still present I'm always surprised by how little that actually ends up effecting my productivity. So it's not my choice for greenfield projects but I'm not nearly as adverse to it now after working with modern day PHP for a bit.

Agreed - I've worked on a few PHP 5 era projects with hand-rolled frameworks and more recently I've worked on a few PHP 7/PHP 8 projects using proper frameworks and it's night and day.

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