PHP mostly competes with Ruby, Python and Node in the web space.
It is generally faster than Ruby and Python.
It's not the mess that javascript is.
Has a sane community with a wide range of well-maintained packages.
Symfony is easily a rival to Django and RoR. At that point it's a matter of preference, but Symfony is top-notch quality. I wouldn't care for the ActiveRecord usage in RoR for example.
I'm not sure that people saying low barrier to entry know what they're talking about. It's the same barrier to entry as for any other scripting language. If you're telling me about FTPing files: this is not how the PHP community has been working for the last ~10 years.
All those people commenting "I have no idea who would start a PHP project today" live in a bubble, probably based in SV.
It is generally faster than Ruby and Python.
It's not the mess that javascript is.
Has a sane community with a wide range of well-maintained packages.
Symfony is easily a rival to Django and RoR. At that point it's a matter of preference, but Symfony is top-notch quality. I wouldn't care for the ActiveRecord usage in RoR for example.
I'm not sure that people saying low barrier to entry know what they're talking about. It's the same barrier to entry as for any other scripting language. If you're telling me about FTPing files: this is not how the PHP community has been working for the last ~10 years.
All those people commenting "I have no idea who would start a PHP project today" live in a bubble, probably based in SV.