(Me, whispering: Maybe the reason PHP is everywhere and in everything is that ease of use, ease of modification and ease of deployment are actually good things and making easy, fun things safe is way, way more important to real world practices and uptake than trying to graft ease of use and fun onto guarantees of safety that computing has never been willing, much less able, to really guarantee anyway.)
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@mhoye "one small, discoverable step up from HTML you can deploy right out of your VCS or editor"
That's Perl.
You're welcome.
@ArneBab
Embedded PHP has been discouraged for decades. Yes, people do it nevertheless… *sigh*
.html files are valid PHP files, but they usually aren’t valid Perl files. However, Perl is usually installed on any server that doesn’t have PHP (yet), so this is installation complexity vs. configuration complexity…
@mhoye The deployment story really is an important one. It amazes me that in all this time nobody has seriously tried to challenge PHP on it
@jalefkowit That PHP is pretty friendly to hosters, for example with the option to set integrated usage limits, is another plus.
Matching that is really hard.
That said: PHP makes it really easy to shoot yourself in the foot, and many already did.
@mhoye
@jalefkowit sftp, or rsync, or literally just “cp”. It’s almost nothing.
My position is: PHP is excellent, and has been excellent for a very long time.
Open, easy and accessible to not just learn and read but tinker with, it's not a ridiculous quasi-proprietary labor-arbitrage exercise disguised as a toolchain that you need a contraption of a CI/CD pipeline to deploy and it works.
There might be better choices for professionals with green-field pro needs, but "one small, discoverable step up from HTML you can deploy right out of your VCS or editor"... that's a lot.