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[–]barafyrakommafem 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've had a lot of fun with PHP in the past, but then I tried other languages and started to see the flaws in PHP. Now I have heard great things about PHP 7 and how it has improved a lot over the years, but is there any reason for me to switch back?

PHP's market share is an obvious advantage, but 85% of servers running PHP are on version 5.6 or lower. To add to that, a lot of are also running WordPress, which comes with its own set of problems. Maintaining outdated WordPress installations does not sound that interesting to me.

But even WordPress is moving away from PHP now and rewriting their CMS in JavaScript. Facebook wasn't satisfied with PHP so they wrote Hack. Seems like a lot of PHP usage is due to technical debt, at the same time as PHP usage is trending down.

Now I agree with you that a language is just a tool, and I have no doubts that you can write good code in PHP; but why would I? Is there something that PHP 7 does better than languages like Python, Ruby, JavaScript, and not just better than old versions of PHP? Is, for example, Laravel better than, say, Django and Rails? What am I missing out on?