I think there is a needless air of elitism especially here that can only come when people take themselves too seriously, seek validation for their choices, and

I think there is a needless air of elitism especially here that can only come when people take themselves too seriously, seek validation for their choices, and are always on 'display'. This is also now fuelling a full scale culture of complexity as nobody wants to do things simply lest they be judged as 'unsophisticated' and lose career and other opportunities. This cannot lead to real conversations or good software. There are far too many naysayers always eager to jump in with their 2 bits of negativity with the same cliched talk points and links most of whom I am sure would never be seen near php and may not even have used it. The criticism goes silent when HN favourites like Slack show up on discussion. Ignoring the sheer number of high traffic websites and successful startups using PHP is just another way to deny it its due. Most PHP apps are a breeze to install and use compared to just about any Ruby or Node app. Try installing Discourse to understand just how user hostile it has become. The respect for users and simplicity comes through in PHP. NPM and Ruby with their dependency hell expect a full dev environment even on user machines and nobody thinks this is ridiculous. There is no denying PHP warts but Node, Ruby and Python I think have their fair share of issues. I really do like Python but for a web project that needs to scale and not get mired in other issues I would choose PHP every single time. For a library or SAAS app maybe, but for an installable app I would never expose users to the Ruby or Node ecosystem.