It's interesting that these kind of false premises come up often on HN. Don't get me wrong, I don't like PHP either, but nowadays. PHP is just as "modern" as many other languages in use. And with frameworks like Laravel and Symfony, it stacks up well against the likes of Ruby on Rails, Django or any NodeJS based stack. And let's not forget that the majority of websites and webapps runs on PHP.

I think that’s totally fair. I have a personal project that I’m getting started on and I’m having trouble picking a stack to use. I hear a lot of conflicting opinions on here. I’ve looked through the documentation for newer frameworks like React and they seem really easy to get started with.

I'm in no place to recommend technologies to chose (I'm no expert) but the documentation argument is a good one. There are a lot of articles from the past few decades introducing different odds and ends with PHP. Additionally, PHPDocs are great but they're nothing in comparison to the tutorials and examples provided by things like ReactJS' or Vue's official docs.

Good eye and good question!

When I first joined, the existing codebase was already built out in PHP on a LAMP stack. I was really opposed to it at first but I've learned to love it since. The safety, speed, and size of a compiled language on the web is something most modern frameworks can't compete with.

I, personally, have built a ton of in-house APIs here aiming to "modernise" php and am really proud of the outcome. It's nowhere as safe, readable, or dynamic as something like a Rust or Swift but PHP is definitely a strong competitor for the modern web (IMO).

This article https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology also really helped me come around early on.

I've been in a similar position at my current job. I was not excited at all to dive into PHP code simply because of how I perceived it externally. But once I started I was pleasantly surprised by how much "just works".