"If you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." Both PHP and the success of Web applications are inextricably tied to each other. It's easy to pick up

"If you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." Both PHP and the success of Web applications are inextricably tied to each other. It's easy to pick up and easy to run. Others commenters have already expanded on these advantages. PHP has treated the Web as a first citizen before anything else for the longest time. It sits on the crossroads of I/O over HTTP(S) and it's really good at what it does. The massive amounts PHP frameworks are testament to that. Even so, moving away from that vantage point, the story shifts quickly. The rise of the Web doesn't just imply managing / processing HTTP(S) I/O - building a simple web interface, a simple REST/JSON API,... - it also means managing the complexity of data management. Data migrations, transformations, juggling processing jobs, tying API's together,... are the bane of many a PHP developer. Many a PHP framework provide API's to do background processing via PHP scripts you run on the command line. There are plenty of PHP libraries out there to make things easier as well. Thing is, languages like Go or Elixir run circles around PHP when it comes to things like concurrency, multi-threading and robustness. Python's idiomatic approach to data munging makes it more suitable then PHP to deal with complex textual as well as binary datasets. PHP absolutely has it place for several classes of business problems. But definitely not for everything. Having spend a decade in PHP consultancy, I've witnessed several client projects suffer heavy delays or fall through because an entire business domain got shoehorned in PHP, and - worse - in specific PHP frameworks that bring their own additional layers of complex abstraction. The latter is not a fault exclusive to PHP or developers who solely specialize in writing PHP, or even a specific PHP framework. Rather, it's caused by complex biases and social dynamics that tend to lead towards a narrow-minded tool-centric approach of complex business challenges. Just like a hammer, PHP is a tool with a limited set of use cases. Just like any language.