I think the biggest pro for PHP is its simplicity. By default you don't have to care about the server. You just place some text-files in a web server directory

I think the biggest pro for PHP is its simplicity. By default you don't have to care about the server. You just place some text-files in a web server directory and open a website, easy. And dynamic languages tend to be easier accessible for newbies too. It is also a con, as some things are just not available (e.g. multi-threading), but in general that lets you focus on the application logic and lowers the entry barrier. Traditionally, a major pro for PHP was also its broad availability for web space but that doesn't seem to be so important nowadays anymore. Putting node, python and Go in the same place against PHP is kinda hard as those three are very distinct from each other already ;-)