Modern PHP wears a business suit and wants to buddy the "big boys" (Java/C#) of the world. You'll have deployment pipelines, strong push towards classic OOP, strict type checking etc.
I personally think ruby for instance is leaner in its dev process in most real world projects.
I believe that PHP is the easiest way to just Get Things Done when you're starting out with a programming language. To deploy a website, you sign up for a free account somewhere, often with a free subdomain like mywebsite.cheapwebhosting.com, put the files on there and hit refresh. Seeing a result immediately is very motivating for beginners, and PHP doesn't require knowing anything complex like DOM manipulation to generate web pages the way Javascript does. If there were as many free web hosts that allowed the same ease of use for C# or some other language with inline templating, I'm sure it'd take off just as easily.
The language isn't as bad as people claim either, I think it's on par with languages like Python and Javascript. PHP has its quirks, like using a dollar sign for variables, it's really not that much worse than its competitors. Shorthands like $_POST/GET/SESSION are such a relief to work with compared to the "professional" languages with their frameworks upon frameworks and complex, layered objects representing state. It's a great tool for setting up a simple website, maybe even a very basic web shop, where the "big boys" are complete overkill. A website like HN doesn't need more than a few PHP files to function until it hits a certain scale, and even then scaling up PHP websites is relatively easy.
I think the real reason people hate PHP is because it's a language used by a lot of beginners and intermediate programmers who overestimate their ability and deliver subpar projects that someone else now needs to maintain or rewrite. I wouldn't want to inherit some kind of custom blogging engine written by an intern three years ago in any programming language, and because of its ease of development many PHP programs are just designed badly.
- install/update PHP or go with the outdated version that shipped with their system.
- have a hosting service that will accept random PHP files
- know what their hosting's PHP version/configuration is to match it locally. For instance their hosting will keep the most secure config possible, thus no out of the box fetching of URLs.
- endlessly fight to find syntax errors as they are too new to have a linter. Depending on the PHP version they settled on they won't have error logs in one place but two.
- fight the endless stream of out of date tips and tricks left by 2 decades of PHP programers of various pedigree.
All of these have different variations for different languages, they all have their barriers and dead bodies in the closet. My take is that PHP isn't specially beginner friendly at this point, at least not as friendly as it was when it began.
Making a public website from scratch will be complex anyway, so they might as well go with a saner setup that uses a templating language and not write code right into the HTML. It won't be much harder and they'll have a fighting chance to find up to date tutorial to host their project easily (hosting a rails project on Heroku for instance could be miles easier in that respect)
You can have deployment pipelines etc, but if you like, you can still develop the ancient way - it still works.
Now you can put .py files into your www folder, like .php files.
One can also use old school CGI to serve their site, it’s super lightweight and you just upload the file at the right place, for almost any language. But that has been deprecated for the last 2 decades now.
