PHP is designed around handling HTTP requests and responses, so it already comes with a lot of the functionality you would need to import into other languages. Whether or not that's an advantage or a hindrance is in the eye of the beholder.
Re:The Future of HHVM
by emodendroket on Tuesday September 19, 2017 @07:35AM
(#15283653)
I don't think I would want to use just plain PHP and it seems like the frameworks that are popular nowadays kind of abstract over all that stuff anyway. In practice I don't think it makes much of a difference.
> But the end result is still the same in either case, basic CRUD - taking an HTTP request, getting some data, pushing it into a template, and sending a response back.
Sure, that's what most PHP apps do... but it's also what most Rails, ASP.NET MVC/WebAPI, Spring, etc. apps do too. And it involves a fair bit more than templating -- database access, data validation, security, etc.
It's true that PHP is rarely used off the Web (although it's possible), but I can't see how what you're describing makes PHP different from any other technology commonly used for Web dev.