Aged but still works...

Yes well, that's because PHP does exactly what it's designed to do, as a domain specific language. Notice how the others are either libraries of global purpose languages, or hell-derived JS. The only true competitor here is the ASP line and you could add parts of Java EE to the same model, but they're not as simple to use as PHP. Also it's not « aged », it still gets updates, what's aged is striving PHP 5 spaghetti (but guess what, that's way worse on the JS side of thing, where even modern code is the ugliest clustered thing ever because of the amount of code monkeys that write it)

Well, ASP.Net is much nicer out of the box

Php was never even close to dead

@hippolyte modern JS ugly? You don't even imagine how good functional looks like. And I'm talking abut aesthetic

@crisz I explicitly stated code monkeys. Every language has an aesthetic identity, but this mass of people will find a way to use half of the syntax wrongly, nest tens of structures instead of using syntactic sugar (made to avoid them), etc.
Monkeys following the trend, and JS being trending, it is more prone to this kind of thing (PHP was too, that's why we are stuck with tons of ugly legacy code)

@hippolyte well yes, that's true. I'm working on a large codebase where a lot of people put their hands. You can't imagine how many things like this I saw:

var _this = this:

var a = [];

arr.map(function(item) {

a.push(_this.transform(item));

return a;

});

Just because they don't know JavaScript and probably they just copied and pasted some JavaScript pre-ES5 answer on StackOverflow. This gives me creeps

Still works!

Simple. PHP had years to know and do stuff properly. Every new language starts from scratch. But unfortunately for them, PHP just keeps getting better :)

Because it is the backbone for the platform that has >40% market share in web.

PHP is like an old Toyota. It has no status, no exclusivity and no luxury. But it runs forever!

Without PHP I would be dead. Long live PHP!

@hippolyte PHP is a templating language, that's exactly what it's designed to do, and it does this one thing really well. Inexplicably, every major framework and ORM tries to separate templating from PHP instead of separating templating from logic within PHP. The way PHP is used today, you could replace it with JS and not even notice anything.

Languages have an identity but people tend to prefer the features that are shared with other languages because they're less likely to behave in an unexpected way.

@lorentz you're right, I struggle at work with people using JS to *programatically* generate HTML on the front-end using some JSON generated by PHP. They don't understand how ridiculous this is, no wonder they want to replace everything with node & co

@hippolyte I kinda understand moving UI rendering to the frontend because it enables a lot of features and performance optimizations that are simply impossible in a server-rendered model, though IMO this choice makes PHP a worse option in all aspects than alternatives. What I don't get is things like Blade, Laravel's templating engine. It's built on PHP, compiles to PHP, does the same exact things as PHP, except it's so bad this warning needs to be issued:

@ostream manipulating and appending to the DOM with things like document.createElement, for complex hierarchies

@ostream HAHAHA I just got busy

Not that it's a bad thing per se, but when you already have PHP as one of the stacks, you better use it for preprocessing as it's probably the most efficient tool for this purpose.

JS spaghetti that creates simple elements from the layout to the content, through tens of nested for loops is the worst thing to write and debug. That's literally because of this stupid philosophy that you need to learn a new JS framework every 6 months if you wish to catch up on this train to hell