For me is the fact that PHP is starting to get more useful than Python. That coupled with the fact that it's faster (which doesn't take much, granted) is going to make me think some things over.

At this point it's faster than most interpreted languages for most things, but speed at that level is rarely something people are pining for.

PHP still carries its legacy cruft around but if you can ignore that it's a useful language. As is often pointed out the real issue is all the PHP 5.4 and older code just hanging around and the desire to be backwards compatible in the hopes maintainers will upgrade PHP seems ... optimistic.

C++ is also full of cruft. But you can use a subset of it and it becomes very good.

Also this new mantra of "speed doesn't matter" is what brought us to Windows 10, Electron, etc. No thanks. I'm taking a stand against slow software.

And people complain as much about C++ as they do about PHP. The emerging languages have put conservative, thoughtful design at the forefront, in great part due to these frustrations.

Apart from apparent ignorance and knee-jerk dismissal?