I'm not the OP, but I have plenty of comparative experience working with Python and JS on the backend (node) and I find PHP to be a very decent option compared to those two.
PHP has an amazing infrastructure of third-party libraries/packages around it, particularly if you're using PHP for web development. In comparison, Python simply does not have the same quality of framework for web like Symfony or Laravel. Django is good, but just that - good. And then there's the matter of speed with Python which is by all metrics slower than PHP.
Then there's node. Node is significantly faster than PHP, but all that speed is wasted away because of all that nightmarish mess that is node_modules. Node infrastructure for backend web dev is nowhere near close to where PHP or even Python is.
- PHP gets you all the way from typeless prototype code to prove an idea, to expressive, runtime-enforced type checks that you can run in production.
- PHP doesn't require static compilation, but can be configured to compile to efficient Opcodes on the first run, making it competitive with Java/Kotlin/whatever speed-wise.
- PHP handles HTTP requests statelessly, starting with a blank slate in extremely short boostrap time. This pretty much eliminates memory leaks for common work loads. This execution model is very simple to reason about, and the major edge, I would argue.
- PHP has an exhaustive ecosystem with a great package manager. All code is namespaced, fetched directly from the source repository (eliminating several security concerns), and usually of high quality. Common frameworks are mature, solidly built, and feature-rich.
- PHP can also be used for other workloads outside of web applications: I've built a realtime message processing system handling thousands of messages per second, spread out across a dynamically scaling number of worker threads. It still happily processes messages as far as I know, and if you've ever received a business communication via messaging apps, chances are it was sent by my system.
All of these things make PHP an excellent choice for a wide range of projects, even compared to statically compiled languages, which you seem so keen to compare a dynamically interpreted language to.
At least for Go and Rust, they have a much steeper learning curve. If you are a startup with limited funds you are not able to target engineers workings with those languages.
If it's just a matter of speed, PHP already is good enough for the great majority of cases. The bottleneck is the data layer, usually. If your problem is being faster than the latest versions of PHP can achieve, you can certainly look for Go/Kotlin/Rust. But if you start your startup optimizing trying to shave off some milliseconds out of a response time you are setting yourself for failure.
And in any case, languages like Go have their own part of quirkiness around the language or tooling (should we talk about how dependencies are managed in Go? that's ages behind npm/composer). Or shall we talk about the lack of exceptions, but then people regularly ask for them?
> At least for Go and Rust, they have a much steeper learning curve.
Agree about Rust, but I should differ from Go, as a disclaimer I never used Go, but read a lot of people switching from JS to Go and they have a very easy time doing so, maybe not everyone find it easy, and also it might to happen that the architecture you are used to work with in NodeJS is similar than the one that Go uses?
> If you are a startup with limited funds you are not able to target engineers workings with those languages.
I think Ruby/Rails will help you to build your project much quicker than Php/[Laravel | Symfony].
> If it's just a matter of speed, PHP already is good enough for the great majority of cases.
Again also Ruby is pretty fast these days (if you want more speed you can use JRuby or TruffleRuby).
> If your problem is being faster than the latest versions of PHP can achieve, you can certainly look for Go/Kotlin/Rust.
Go: I should say yes, if PHP/Ruby isn't enough, this should your go to.
Kotlin: I cannot speak about it, I'm not sure how popular is in this space.
Rust: I love rust but I think this should be your last resort, if Go isn't enough
anymore.
But I can agree that work with Php is pretty easy (I worked with Php since 4.2 till 5.3, then tried it with some projects here and there with 7.x and 8.x) but I cannot stress how bad the tooling around php feels if you compare with others (ruby is bad too IMHO), JS with vscode, rust with rust-analyzer, etc. The only way I found a decent tool was with PhpStorm, but you need to pay for it (even the Laravel plugin needs a subscription), while the RubyMine is almost the same at least Rails works out of the box without an extra subscription for the plugins.
> At least for Go and Rust, they have a much steeper learning curve.
Yes for rust, not really for Go. I was able to pick up the basics of Go in less than a day, and the more advanced topics I was able to pick up not long after. OTOH I've tried to pick up Rust several times, and every time I just sit back in defeat.
> should we talk about how dependencies are managed in Go?
I'm curious what you're referring to here. Go's package management works, and is decent enough. No centralisation, and can work with just about any git repo.
PHP has an amazing infrastructure of third-party libraries/packages around it, particularly if you're using PHP for web development. In comparison, Python simply does not have the same quality of framework for web like Symfony or Laravel. Django is good, but just that - good. And then there's the matter of speed with Python which is by all metrics slower than PHP.
Then there's node. Node is significantly faster than PHP, but all that speed is wasted away because of all that nightmarish mess that is node_modules. Node infrastructure for backend web dev is nowhere near close to where PHP or even Python is.