I used to think so, too - that PHP is mostly Wordpress and it's dying, its evolution stopped at PHP 5 and it's just better to avoid it.... But, by the will of

I used to think so, too - that PHP is mostly Wordpress and it's dying, its evolution stopped at PHP 5 and it's just better to avoid it.... But, by the will of fate, I ended up writing enterprise software in PHP, visiting PHP conferences, etc. and it made me realize how wrong I was. PHP is widely used in enterprise for mission-critical projects, in many large corporations, in distributed systems, in backends, it's not only about user-facing blogs; I guess it's not advertized much because PHP is old and "boring" as a language, but it does its job. Modern PHP7+ deprecates many of the old quirks, focuses on modern OOP practices, encourages type hinting, it's now one of the fastest interpreters; if you use something like Symfony/Doctrine then PHP feels more-less like Java/Spring/Hibernate but with faster prototyping/iteration times because PHP doesn't require compilation and there's less ceremony.