Here’s a nice overview of “PHP in 2019” for those who are still trying to avoid the language because of some preconceived or outdated reasons.
TL;DR
* PHP is actively developed with a new release each year
* Performance since the PHP 5 era has doubled, if not tripled
* There’s a extremely active eco system of frameworks, packages and platforms
* PHP has had lots of new features added to it over the past few years, and the language keeps evolving
* Tooling like static analysers has matured over the past years, and only keeps growing
And here are some of the recent features that have made it into the language:
Here’s a non-exhaustive list of new features in PHP:
* Short closures
* Null coalescing operator
* Traits
* Typed properties
* Spread operator
* JIT compiler
* FFI
* Anonymous classes
* Return type declarations
* Contemporary cryptography
* Generators
* Lots more