Modern php dev with packages managed by composer is fine. Its not perfect but I think immediately dismissing anything written in php is wrong.

> I think immediately dismissing anything written in php is wrong

I have specifically pointed at multi-platform, network-intensive applications, and never claimed that PHP is not suitable for anything.

If someone is not able to choose the right tool for the job, how can you trust him to do the job right?

Please elaborate why PHP is an inadequate tool for developing multi-platform, network-intensive applications?

Go has much better concurrency, networking, and packaging capabilities. NodeJS can be used for both, front-end and back-end, including iOS / Android. Clojure(Script) provides more than Go and NodeJS combined, but was too new at the time. Even Python would be a much more powerful choice than PHP for anything, that is not a simple LAMP application.

Most of your points are irrelevant (packaging, JS as a compilation target, mobile development) as they do not support your argument that PHP would be inadequate for the task at hand. You seem not to like PHP, which is fine, neither do I, but this is not conclusive.

I have spent many years doing PHP development and still do, but the only technical people I know who pick PHP for new projects are the ones, for whom it's the only programming language they know. Therefore, my trust in their all-around competence is very limited.

I downvoted you because PHP is a perfectly fine choice. All web scripting languages are cross platform and work perfectly fine, there's no one right language.

I have to tentatively agree... I would think that Python, NodeJS and Go would all be better options. Node would have the benefits of similar tooling for the UX/UI side as the backend, Python would also be scripted with more consistent constraints and Go was designed for this kind of workload.

NodeJS didn't exist, Python is slow and Go scales fine on ONE server but doesn't scale horizontally very well... while PHP scales perfectly that way. It has downsides, which is why we pick other languages for some components (our Spreed High Performance Back-end for Nextcloud Talk is written in Go, our app store in Ruby).

But talk was initially written in Go, which made it harder to install, so we actually rewrote it in PHP... There's a lot of value in having a built-in app store that is easy to use from the web UI. There is a reason why the web runs on PHP. And it isn't because it is perfect, but it has some neath advantages that just help in many scenarios.

How does Go scale horizontally any less well than PHP exactly?