I'm an experienced JVM developer (mainly Java & Scala) and I had to accept a freelancing project in which one administration component was written in Laravel, a

I'm an experienced JVM developer (mainly Java & Scala) and I had to accept a freelancing project in which one administration component was written in Laravel, a PHP framework. To be honest, the codebase was pretty clean, I could easily understand what's going on, I've used phpStorm as my IDE since I'm used to the feeling of Jetbrains tools. Managed to hack and do the changes in just one week without any prior PHP knowledge. Would I build something new with PHP? Now, I wouldn't. It is not that bad as a language to hack on Wordpress or small websites with Laravel but beside that, it is hard not to choose JVM or Node as platforms for your future projects. Maybe a PHP implementation built on GraalVM will enable PHP to call into JVM libraries. GC and other things will be provided for free, though I think it will be some work since the majority of PHP is native code and its syntax is quite messy.