I occasionally spend time answering questions on programming subreddits and it seems to be no less than a weekly occurrence that I read "my [friend | teacher | dog] told me to stay away from PHP because it's [dead | dying | PHP]".
PHP is a lot of things, including but not limited to: my least favourite language, inconsistent.
Let's admit it - it's cool to hate on PHP. But let's look at the numbers.
Source: W3Techs. "For the surveys, we count the top 10 million websites according to Alexa and Tranco". Note: Languages used by less than 0.1% are omitted. These include Miva Script, C, Lasso, C++, Smalltalk, Go, Tcl, Haskell, Lisp, Ada.
Luke Taylor is a software developer specialising in web. He mostly works with Next.js but has experience with a range of languages and frameworks. Based in London, UK.