PHP makes it very easy to run web pages that need some server backend. Back in the days, everyone was using it. Same with Ruby, was fun when there was a lot of

PHP makes it very easy to run web pages that need some server backend. Back in the days, everyone was using it. Same with Ruby, was fun when there was a lot of people using the language/tooling but nowadays the action is moving to other languages that are "cool" (go, rust, haskell, ...) As others commented here, PHP becomes a serious bottleneck as a project becomes more complex. In fact, to deal with complexity you will see PHP tackling the problems in a manner very similar to Java, but without being Java. So in the end you'd likely be better off with Java to begin with.