That's a very dated view of PHP. Modern PHP is far "cooler" than it was a few years ago. Just look at the entire https://laravel.com ecosystem — the most starred web framework on all of GitHub, across all languages, is Laravel.

Discovering Laravel a couple of years ago was perhaps one of the most significant things that made PHP interesting again after 20+ years of working with PHP.

It's refreshing (as far as PHP goes) and worth checking out with an open mind. Performance on the other hand, that take a little more work.

Performance keeps getting better, particularly with PHP 7 and 8. And just last week, “Laravel Octane” was announced... it lets you serve a Laravel app using Swoole, and early benchmarks on a MacBook Pro suggest 25k+ HTTP requests served per second!

Cool, I'll have to get updated and checkout Laravel Octane soon after clearing a work backlog, did notice Taylor tweet something about it.

I'm guessing your benchmarks are using native php-fpm and not through docker on your MBP?

Laravel Octane is using Swoole which implements a complete webserver, so there won‘t be any php-fpm more. As you would need to restart the server for every code change, there won‘t be a performance difference between docker on mac and non-docker.

I’m not too sure, I was just quoting the figures Taylor gave after his Laracon demo. I think the beta is being released next week.

Also, WordPress. WordPress is pretty much everywhere.

and there are reasons for that. As bad as it is for a developer experience, the ui for non-tech people just can't be beat.

Oh, definitely. As a blogging engine it's quite usable and very easy to get used to even for people who are IT-illiterate.

I'm not convinced it's the best for building e-commerce sites and whatever people are piggy-backing on top of WordPress nowadays.

Oh, I get that, it was more directed at the OP. It's not your Rust, Nim or Crystal or... which is what I meant about 'cool'. Coolness is always in the eye of the beholder :)