I worked at a company that did remote energy monitoring (circuit by circuit, minute by minute for thousands of monitors). We did all the math in PHP, preping, summarizing data and sending it down to web services. It wasn't fast, but it couldn't be considered slow by any stretch.

Plus php has a large library of components (Zend, symfony) and a package manager (composer) that make web development significantly easier.

Well, I'm sure there were a number of key factors involved.

I'm currently porting a rails app to Laravel and the speed boost has been pretty remarkable, not to mention not ever having to install gems whose only purpose is to reboot unicorn when the memory leaks hit a certain threshold.

I didn't choose Laravel because I like PHP (I don't), I chose it because of the need to balance ease of development with speed with having less skilled developers be able to maintain it with a modicum of safety. Not to mention how ridiculously easy it is to horizontally scale PHP.

I'd like PHP more if they dropped the f*cking $ sign though.

It's a good tool if you need to get shit done.

I love the $ sign -- super easy to see variables versus just bare words where you just rely on case or naming convention.

Of course, my first language was Perl, so I've been in love with the $ for ages.

The dollar sign usually only bothers me after I've gone away and written a little Python. Actually, has anyone ever tried a 'CoffeeScript for PHP' that removed the dollar sign, replaced the `->` with dot syntax, and smoothed over the various other syntax features that people complain about? Not that I'd think there'd be much point really, apart from being a fun project.

Not sure how actively maintained it is, but you could try Mammouth: http://mammouth.wamalaka.com/

My only hesitation with it has been that you need Node.js to compile it to regular PHP -- it offers no analogue to coffeescript's eval-in-browser mode for development.

The upcoming PHP 7 version releasing this fall has significant speed improvements.

Well PHP still rules the hosting landscape. If your company already has php developers then switching languages may not be that easy.

And what would you propose using instead? Every language has its ups and downsides and the majority of problems (anecdotally anyways) come not from the language but the data store availability and ability to scale anyways.

PHP makes for fast development, even if there are languages out there that offer faster execution.

Laravel has been ~100% HHVM compatible for a while, so you might not even have to worry about execution speed if you go with Lumen.