Happily! - PHP gets you all the way from typeless prototype code to prove an idea, to expressive, runtime-enforced type checks that you can run in production.

Happily! - PHP gets you all the way from typeless prototype code to prove an idea, to expressive, runtime-enforced type checks that you can run in production. - PHP doesn't require static compilation, but can be configured to compile to efficient Opcodes on the first run, making it competitive with Java/Kotlin/whatever speed-wise. - PHP handles HTTP requests statelessly, starting with a blank slate in extremely short boostrap time. This pretty much eliminates memory leaks for common work loads. This execution model is very simple to reason about, and the major edge, I would argue. - PHP has an exhaustive ecosystem with a great package manager. All code is namespaced, fetched directly from the source repository (eliminating several security concerns), and usually of high quality. Common frameworks are mature, solidly built, and feature-rich. - PHP can also be used for other workloads outside of web applications: I've built a realtime message processing system handling thousands of messages per second, spread out across a dynamically scaling number of worker threads. It still happily processes messages as far as I know, and if you've ever received a business communication via messaging apps, chances are it was sent by my system. All of these things make PHP an excellent choice for a wide range of projects, even compared to statically compiled languages, which you seem so keen to compare a dynamically interpreted language to.