FWIW, i'll disagree. i was a _huge_ PHP fan from around 1999 until 2010, but two things finally killed it for me:
1) It's apparently impossible to cleanly structure large projects with PHP. i've been a part of many such projects across a large handful of teams, and every one of them eventually became a complete mess, structurally speaking, no matter how conscientious the developers were. Java, for example, forces a directory structure onto developers. PHP is more C-like in that regard - "do whatever you want" - and i've yet to see that end well for older/larger projects.
2) Breaking age-old working features with new releases, like when they removed split or join or implode or explode (two of the four, but i don't recall which). When they did that, and my decade-old website suddenly stopped working, i lost all motivation to continue maintaining sites in PHP. Dropped it that very day (for my personal sites) and have not looked back. i still had to use it in commercial projects off and on through 2014, and each one only help cement point #1 for me.
sgbeal•26m ago
1) It's apparently impossible to cleanly structure large projects with PHP. i've been a part of many such projects across a large handful of teams, and every one of them eventually became a complete mess, structurally speaking, no matter how conscientious the developers were. Java, for example, forces a directory structure onto developers. PHP is more C-like in that regard - "do whatever you want" - and i've yet to see that end well for older/larger projects.
2) Breaking age-old working features with new releases, like when they removed split or join or implode or explode (two of the four, but i don't recall which). When they did that, and my decade-old website suddenly stopped working, i lost all motivation to continue maintaining sites in PHP. Dropped it that very day (for my personal sites) and have not looked back. i still had to use it in commercial projects off and on through 2014, and each one only help cement point #1 for me.
i don't miss it.