I know it sounds childish but PHP is lame as hell same as java. Rust or go would have definitely been a cooler choice. I mean PHP gets the job done, but still....

As a single developer taking on a passion project you go with what you know.

Also it must have been near impossible to have foreseen the insane explosion of popularity that has happened here the last few days.

Even then if you build something for passion you choose something that make you happy to use, however esoteric or impractical that may be to others, or how it would be perceived. Most probably it was never thought to be exposed in such a massive way, and certainly not as soon after the project was started (we're talking month(s) here).

Anyhow, for this project from the looks of it it is working fantastic.

Personally I've not used PHP for years but now I'm actually intrigued to take a new look at it.

Modern PHP is supposedly pretty alright but yes I was surprised and a bit disappointed, I would have liked to contribute but I'm not gonna touch PHP in my free time lol.

There's a sister project at my work that still uses PHP. It did surprise me, but it's very well written and easy to maintain. I reckon php will be around for a while yet.

Nowadays is only a matter of community and resources related to the language that one can find online. Php lost popularity and gained this image as a bad language, this brings a lot of devs to not use Php without a real factual reason. Is just not cool or they feel ashamed to tell that they work with Php.

If a dev works with typescript is more easy to find a lot of cool and pleasing resources, videos, articles. With php, for the reasons explained above, the stuff you can find it does not feel so cool as other mainstream languages. And here the game start over, for this reason less people use it and so on. This give to the entire php ecosystem a kind of "old" feeling and a lot of young devs just don't like it.

But rarely there are real reasons. With php 8 for sure there are not a lot of reasons to blame the language to be a bad language.

Until a couple of years ago I used to work with the last versions of php and I actually never felt the urges to redactor everything in some other language.

I am sure that php has limits, but in the same way as all other languages have their limits: they are just tools at the end.

Stop blaming php. Blame WordPress instead! :D

But I would ask he opposite question: can somebody make an argument to not use php? From a dev point of view.

@WatTyler No really. I have seen that PhP developers are moving to other languages, but at the same time I have been involved in new projects using it (I'm not a PhP developer).