In terms of simplicity, nothing beats PHP. It's easily deployable everywhere, everyone knows how to use this simple language, and the Laravel ecosystem is fantastic. But I understand what you mean.

I've been using PHP for a decade and recently started building APIs in Go. Everything about the process has been significantly simpler, from packages to testing to deploying and debugging. I don't think I can ever go back, and this is coming from someone who still loves PHP and works with both Go and Laravel daily.

I've been exploring doing some of my PHP stuff in Go and my opinion has been the complete opposite. PHP, I can just start composing a page; Go, I have to implement a router and serving static content.

The Monica dev mentioned Laravel in this thread. In Laravel, one also must start with defining a router.

This is only true if you have a LAMP server already. On none of my servers runs PHP, so setting that up would be definitly more work than adding another binary to my systemd.

How so? If you use Docker, there are all-in-one images. If you use conventional deployment, there are howto guides and/or meta packages to get things up and running.

Besides, a lot of people use shared hosting for any number of reasons. Anything not PHP based is doomed there.

There's a Docker image for Moncica which seems pretty dead-simple https://github.com/monicahq/docker

As a matter of fact, Monica has an official Docker image here: https://hub.docker.com/_/monica

(I'm super proud to say that we have an official Docker image, official being the label the Docker granted us last year as they (Docker, the company) maintain it. There are not a lot of official Docker images, but we are part of it, and it's awesome)