This is a pretty silly take. It's like saying that performance improvements in the Java runtime and advanced garbage collectors like G1GC and ZGC are evidence of the weakness of Java.
> Admittedly PHP has had recent performance gains, but by no means would it ever be a first choice in any backend service architecture.
Other than at Yahoo, Facebook, ...
Don't get me wrong; PHP has issues. But it's very mature; it's fast; it's easy to learn; it has a very diverse and rich ecosystem; it's easy to debug; and in general, it's very useful for building reasonably efficient and performant scalable web services.
> Admittedly PHP has had recent performance gains, but by no means would it ever be a first choice in any backend service architecture.
Other than at Yahoo, Facebook, ...
Don't get me wrong; PHP has issues. But it's very mature; it's fast; it's easy to learn; it has a very diverse and rich ecosystem; it's easy to debug; and in general, it's very useful for building reasonably efficient and performant scalable web services.