Good questions. Well firstly phpstorm is a very high quality. I can work with php code in various contexts such as running test suites, normal development and

Good questions. Well firstly phpstorm is a very high quality. I can work with php code in various contexts such as running test suites, normal development and connecting to a live server. It definitely has good support for running and debugging test suites including unit, integration and functional. There is support for vagrant and docker as well. The tooling is good because there are lot of users willing to pay for good tooling, but at the same time it can only exist if the underlying language supports the features needed. I wouldn't say the libraries and tools give it a significant advantage over other languages actually, but it's a notable factor of php development that there is likely a framework and library for your needs. Regarding training, once we had a reliable application and we'd figured out as a team some best practises regarding avoiding php's bad parts, how to avoid or detect and handle runtime errors and how to organize and layout code, it's a fairly simple matter to point a new programmer at these documents and code samples. There's really not much to the language and a smart and/or experienced programmer can be productive in days. I'm not sure that's the case if you move someone from say c to Python or from Ruby to Scala.