This is a preemptive plea for people who last wrote PHP in 2012 not to opine on what writing PHP is like in 2025. It is not a hammer with two claws. It’s a modern language with types and tooling and package management.
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- Can you use the same rendering logic on client and server like JavaScript?
- Does it have the performance of Java or C# or Go?
- Does it allow for expressive DSLs like Ruby?
- Does it have an extensive, cutting edge ML ecosystem like Python?
Back in 2010, PHP's stand out features were very straightforward installation, good support for templating, and a large collection of C library wrappers (even if the interfaces were a bit raw). Those hooks were compelling enough to make people put up with the PHP4 core language.
But other languages have caught up on those three points, which leaves modern PHP utterly unremarkable. It doesn't have any feature that stands out enough to make me want to switch back.
To answer your question, I don’t know that modern PHP has big advantages over other modern languages. I’m not knocking on doors to spread the gospel of Symfony. But there’s no need to switch away from it either. And hosting is still easy and cheap. Prototyping your product as a Laravel or Symfony app is a reasonable choice.