> why don't the PHP developers identify and build on the unique strengths of PHP? Which are IMO: [...] the original purpose of PHP as a high-level scripting lan

> why don't the PHP developers identify and build on the unique strengths of PHP? Which are IMO: [...] the original purpose of PHP as a high-level scripting language embedded in otherwise static HTML as in "<?php ...>". I really don't think that's a strength of PHP. It's very bad at that, and that's not been a focus of the language for decades. PHP, even with the work you suggest, is always going to be inferior compared to something like Liquid, Jinja, or Twig. It's arguably true that PHP should focus on improving the things that make people use it, but nobody is using it because of that. Even the ability to run PHP on shared hosting is increasingly irrelevant as we move past that being a useful feature.