One possibility is to make a language that compiles to PHP, like what TypeScript is for JavaScript, but not necessarily superset. PHP already has a ton of well

One possibility is to make a language that compiles to PHP, like what TypeScript is for JavaScript, but not necessarily superset. PHP already has a ton of well tested infrastructure to interact with web servers so you don't want to reimplement that again. And by compiling to PHP you get the same request model that PHP has which works great for quick and dirty web jobs. You can also leverage the performance improvements of PHP. If you could hook that up to apache with a handler it would be great compile to PHP language file extension -> Apache handler -> compile it to PHP -> Apache handler -> PHP Apache SAPI