Honest question, have there been startups which chose PHP recently?

To be even more honest, I never thought that PHP was dying, but I often thought it should not be used for new projects.

Previous job was in a very PHP-oriented company and it was just a Java alternative, the only advantage being the edit and refresh page dev cycle, and being worse in every other way. Perhaps Laravel could have changed my mind, as most devs there hated Laravel because of the magic (some then proceeded to implement control flows with typed exception throwing so maybe not the greatest bunch to discuss such things)

To answer your question YES

https://wellfound.com/startups/tech/php

I believe a good developer chooses technologies based on use case and requirements, not emotions.

All technologies can coexist effectively.

Personally, I use PHP, Node.js, and other like Python for different scenarios, selecting the best fit for each project's needs.

Plenty of "new projects" are really just WordPress deployments, and companies need PHP developers to customize it to fit their business processes. I'd imagine that's the market for 90% of PHP developers being hired today.

My project uses PHP and it’s pretty successful. Technology doesn’t matter as much as executing quickly on your ideas.

Just because there's demand doesn't mean it's thriving.

Is usage growing?

How many new projects are being started with it relatively to other languages?

I certainly don't think it's dead but it probably peaked 10-15 years ago.

PHP is a mature, established language. There is a large ecosystem of developers that actively use it, and large scale projects built on top of it. It is certainly not dead nor dying. It is just mature.

It is probably past its growth phase, nothing wrong with that. There is a very long list of languages that are arguably "better" that will never have a fraction of the success PHP enjoyed, will never see thr growth PHP saw, and will never be as widely used.

I don't even like PHP btw. But the HN crowd has some very warped view of how things actually are when it comes to programming languages and how popular/successful they are.

I'd even argue that starting a new project in php makes more sense today than it did 10-15 years ago. php now has a stable development cycle and mature frameworks and tools.

having peaked 15 years ago and still being actively used is success. How many JS frameworks survive more than a few years?

I agree about JS. Although jQuery and Angular are very much alive.

My point was that "PHP is thriving" cannot be deduced from the pull stats from docker. As the TLA does.

You now add an anecdotal evidence to underpin the "PHP is thriving". Which also is not a good argument.

That is not to say "haha php ded" - I'm merely and only making the point that in order to show that PHP is doing good, you need good arguments. Not a download stat, that on closer inspection, shows it's not really thriving, nor a story from your last job.

I also believe PHP still has its place. But haven't seen any solid evidence or arguments that this is the case and will remain the case.