PHP is a strange and (let’s get it over with) ugly, little language. It’s not exceptionally fast. It’s not beautiful syntactically. It’s not formulated around a clear opinion. And it’s still what I write a lot of software in. The obvious question is: why?
https://pressupinc.com/blog/2014/03/why-php/
This is a good read, especially for all the “PHP haters” (ie Java and C++ programmers!) out there.