It's the end of 2018 and you hear about javascript frameworks everywhere. PWA here, ajax there. PHP has been born in 1995 which means, that it's older than many of the web devs nowadays. According to Rasmus Lerdorf PHP is abused from it's original sense to build a dynamic output for websites.

PHP was designed for frontend modeling. He was surprised that people that started using php were using it for backend code as well, which finally pushed the sense of php to where it is now. Noone wanted to use PHP as the modeling language it was designed for because programmers are always lazy as fuck and I guess they were upset serving and manipulating data in C/C++ to serve it to the frontend and finally push it to the user.

I guess that's what i would have done as well. So PHP slowly became rather a data manipulation language than just the output modeling language it was supposed to be.

When PHP jumped from version 5 to version 7, there were huge improvements made as the developers of PHP worked together with some guys from intel to get a better understanding of how data is cached and processed which now leads to a speed improvement of running PHP for up to 100%.

In my opinion PHP is pretty usable to create fast implementations, there are many packages available and at least 80% of the webpages these days make use of php somewhere. It's delivering static content but it's fast as fuck (used the right way) and it can be easily combined with JavaScript which complement each other quite well.

In you wanna know more about php in these day's just take a look at Lerdorfs session where most of my information comes from.