PHP is not mature or fast or popular? And PHP is very far from dead no matter where you are. In fact is getting a lot more interest now since PHP 7.

If you don't like PHP that's one thing but what you said is just wrong.

PHP isn't dead, and it will never be dead, but as a long time and continuing professional Perl developer myself, let me tell you that you're better off just accepting that your language of choice isn't in vogue anymore.

It's not all bad once you're on the ass-end of history. I'm sure you can easily identify a few negatives being the language de jour bring (such as lots of shitty programmers joining the community all the time). Welcome to middle-age. ;)

Perl 5 is pulling me like a superstrong magnet. I haven't had time to read the basics and things like choosing the correct sigil + accessor trim me up, but still, it has many niceties. To begin with, you can have a statement "use v5.x;" and be done with which interpreter problem: it can tell you it needs sth. different, and does not fail because you have python3 to be 3.x, but the script needs 3.x+y, or you have the shebang as python3.x but the system has 3.x+y which is compatible, but you can only have one full path in the shebang... Then the context variable $_ is just lovely. The availability of mature libraries for everything is a trait Perl shares with a small number of languages. Its integration to Unix and its expressivity are second to none. The documentation, while not as accessible as Emacs', is available on you computer offline in man pages, and perldoc can give you proper docs on functions (unlike crappy help() in Python which never shows you anything useful and you have to go to the docs, usually online), add to that POD being a very nice way to add documentation to your scripts and also view them (if its in the path you can "perldoc <script>" and get help. And once you know your way around perl* man pages, you can just program independently, with little or no need to go online for Perl stuff. All niceties other languages/communities could've had, but just don't, because, well IDK why.

I'm a 25yo, so when I started programming Perl hatred was the hot thing already. Well, luckily as a curious person I discovered its just baseless cargo cult. Perl is one of the best tools to have in your toolbox.

Well said!

PHP is not dead - plain and simple. Independent of whether it is good or not, selecting technologies based on your biases for your client is completely irresponsible. There are plenty of mature, fast and popular options out there. PHP is one of them.

denial!

There are many successful companies and start ups that use PHP. The same way they exist for other languages and platforms.

No start up became a unicorn because of the programming language they used.

With the possible exception of Clojure :). See Paul Graham on Lisp as the secret weapon.

What's the biggest Clojure start-up at the moment? Is it CircleCI?

Wal-Mart is pretty big into Clojure these days, but they were already huge.

Here in London there's Funding Circle and uSwitch. The Daily Mail (MailOnline) also uses quite a lot of Clojure.

Whatsapp.

whats whatsapp built on?

Erlang and FreeBSD

This is just bs. PHP is thriving everywhere expect Silicon Valley.

Even there, aren’t Facebook and Etsy using it, at least?

And WordPress, Yahoo, Salesforce, Adobe, eBay and on and on. You'll have a hard time finding any tech company that doesn't use it to some extent.

And Wikipedia

And slack

I don't know which planet you're living on but all you need to do is search Indeed.com for title:php and you'll find PHP is up there with Java, C# and Javascript in terms of the number of jobs. In some countries Java, JS and PHP are the only languages used in any significant numbers. Likewise in more technologically advanced countries once you get away from the tech hubs. I'm not a fan of PHP and I wish it was true but dead it certainly ain't.