What made you choose PHP as a server side language?

I started web stuff back when you'd just drop a Perl/Bash/binary into /cgi-bin/ and hope for the best ;-) I switched from Perl to Php for web stuff as it had a lot of things that made doing html/http stuff really easy - it was also easy to get it working with apache & mod_php.

I played with ruby a bit in the earlyish 2000's and rails when it first came out. I really like ruby, but just didn't have the time to learn it properly - it was competing with Perl at the time and didn't really have anything to compare with CPAN or the cross-OS support that Perl had. My memory of early rails is that it was shifting almost constantly and I got fed up with it.

I tried out some of python's web stuff at various times, but it never really clicked for me. Certainly not enough to make it worth using over PHP. I've written fairly large applications in Python, but for the web I don't really see an advantage unless you're already wedded to it.

I used node for a while for small-ish api stuff - but again, the churn was really annoying. More recently I've done a lot of api/microservice stuff with Go. It's really nice - especially if you're familiar with 'plain' C. But again, I don't think I'd use it for website stuff - PHP lets me do that cross-platform & OS and, well, easily ;-)

As for PHP itself, there's nothing I especially hate about it. It's fairly straightforward - no particular theoretical axe to grind or way of thinking laid down, no special tooling or setup. It lets me get work done.

Great points!

I also seem to come back to PHP, it's ease of deployment, the quickness with which I get things done. At the same time, it does feel ugly compared to other languages. After all, it's a templating engine that grew into a language.

I came from java, but took over a site for a humane society, being a non-profit I went with what they had, as their funds were limited, so I learned PHP so I could press on with the site. At first regular PHP with no framework, but as soon as I discovered how good a framework organizes things I never looked back.

PHP has come a long way in the last decade. A decade or so ago you would probably not see a large Enterprise use PHP but now with a good framework it's fine for Enterprise also.

I'm not a big fan of frameworks myself. Especially big ones. Lots of bloat. I think the best way to organize code is to use Unix philosophy and go modular, much like node JS does. With composer, it's easier than ever to write PSR compliant PHP code with little dependencies. Then you can use a micro-framework and decide which PSR packages you need. A php 7 ADR micro-framework is my dream. Equip is good, but it's not really maintained anymore.