PHP has been in a weird place for nearly a decade now in technical forums like HN where it is mocked endlessly often to signal a superior technical understandin

PHP has been in a weird place for nearly a decade now in technical forums like HN where it is mocked endlessly often to signal a superior technical understanding by people who would not deign to use it. As if its the only language with shortcomings. Yet it continued to be used in some of the most scalable and widely used apps of our generation from Wikipedia, Wordpress, Facebook, Slack and more. It often feels other languages marketing teams have preyed on it in many ways to gain attention. And there has been some kind of war against simplicity that places an unearned respect for 'clever' abstractions under the guise of scalability often in pursuit of resume padding, or 'best practices' entryism and gaining influence in projects via package managers and the like.