Not the OP, but my experience: C# would be my first choice, but in my current job I've had to work on Ruby on Rails and a Symfony app with PHP 7 and I would choose the latter any day of the week.

I really dislike working with Ruby because, you know, who knows what the hell the code does until you try running it, and the IDE support is terrible.

On the other hand, working in "modern" OO PHP feels a little like working in a weird, older version of Java. PHPStorm can give a great IDE experience, I can add type declarations everywhere, the code is generally predictable once you learn some PHP quirks, etc. Also, in my opinion, Symfony is way better designed than Rails, and definitely closer than ASP.NET MVC than Rails is.

I feel like it'd be a pretty different story if I were working on Wordpress or some ancient legacy PHP code or whatever, but I'm not, so that's not really my concern.

Symfony is really great fun to work with, the attention to structural design and implementation is divine. As projects grow they almost get easier to work on, as Symfony forces and supports you in modularising and reduction.

Yeah, I haven't got much bad to say about it. Maybe I would like to have somewhat less manual route configuration.

I went from a rails app back to PHP for Symfony as well.

The strength of PHP is the fact that you can get php hosting for almost no money, that takes no effort to setup, is shared but isolated, and is almost always portable

A programmers response is “I can throw Django in a container” or “I can just buy a digital ocean droplet”, and that’s true for a Developer, but it’s like putting Linux on your grandma’s laptop - you can maintain it, but the target audience can’t

The reason people build sites in PHP is that the people for whom they’re building the sites can trivially support it. Forever.

Most web interactions are: your client sends a request to a server, the server sends back a response. That's kinda the model of php: single execution, no need to manage memory or resources because the world is destroyed once you've send your response. So php is a good fit for webdev.

Until you start playing with sockets or things like kafka then you really want languages which are made for long lived processes. But if you're just making a REST API, blog or anything which is not an app with sockets php is a good choice. Especially since 7.0, composer and the current leading frameworks Laravel and Symfony changed the landscape.

I really like the that you don't need a templating language on top of it, just use shorthand php syntax instead.

I also find that developmemt time is quite fast, even without using frameworks.

You probably don't need templating languages or frameworks, php makes it easy without it, it's built for it.

The performance is quite good, way better that most people think. It's also easy to write functionality in C if you really need to go all out.

For other stuff than web development PHP has it's downsides. It's made for building websites and in my opinion it's doing that job very well, but most other languages are general languages that works better for most other things.

I think most people would enjoy PHP way more without a heavy and insanely slow framework.

Python ruby java node c# go are all better web development languages than PhP.

why?