i came of programmer age around the era of eevee's "php: a fractal of bad design", a document that in hindsight was profoundly harmful. alas.

i actually like php. as far as scripting languages go, it is (or was) extremely easy to pick up and play with. it's actually one of the reasons i really liked it as a language: in the era before "package managers" and "containerization" and the like, a lot of these apps were tiny and could play together. a ton of the reason early php shit was so "terrible" was because we were all amateurs playing with toys, it hadn't really solidified yet.

php includes a ton of shit in its standard library, almost anything you could want to do is there. you don't have to deal with compilation, building, trying to find what stupid package happens to have a library to do string parsing or figuring out dates. it's just there.

people used to hate on php, but at least php is server-side. php loves you. php does not require you to download packages to pad strings, require you to devote bytes to caching certain numbers of spaces to juice performance. php will just sit there and work and do its job.

i've been using it for like 24 years and if you asked me i'd still buy php a beer and shoot javascript in the back of the head. and if i did, the world'd be a better place.

(at least until dreamhost force-upgrades you, but that's a different problem)