There have been huge improvements made with PHP over the past few years. PHP 7 is great and I would choose it over Hack. Modern PHP using autoloading (Packagist

There have been huge improvements made with PHP over the past few years. PHP 7 is great and I would choose it over Hack. Modern PHP using autoloading (Packagist & Composer) and an MVC structure allows for rapid development. With frameworks such as Laravel, you can get something up quickly or just pull in Packagist libraries you need if you don't want the bloat of a framework. I recently finished up a fairly complex web app that uses PHP 7 for the back-end. Took me under 2 weeks to develop partly because I was able to leverage a lot of stable and well supported libraries through Packagist. It brought in over $4k its first month. Not bad for 2 weeks worth of work. It would have been hard to accomplish the same thing that quickly leveraging Node or Python (I use both) at lease for this app.