PHP 8.5

A lot of people are too proud to be associated with PHP. I am ready to admit that know nothing about the language except that a lot of people make cool things with it.

My favourite PHP product at the moment is BookStack (https://www.bookstackapp.com/), a really good wiki. I run an instance for my family and it's great.

But there are loads of things. And I notice that many of the sites I like using...are built on well maintained PHP stacks.

I'd take PHP instead of JS/TS + framework-of-the-day on the backend anytime. Ok, PHP is usually also paired with a framework (cough Laravel cough), but at least there the situation is more stable, not to mention more mature. Unfortunately, I'm not the only one making the decisions...

PHP is a reasonable choice if you care about writing something that will still work out of the box 10 years from now.

But of course this assumes that you work with a team that can see a year ahead, let alone 10.

PHP has introduced breaking changes, deprecations etc. in a somewhat rapid fashion.

PHP doesn't prioritize stability, but language features and cleanup. It's an impressive technical endeavor that has its merits, but comes with a tradeoff.

Within the last 10 years, the language itself broke twice. And that's not counting the ecosystem on top of it. Common frameworks, libraries etc. tend to break relatively often as well.

There are languages that are _much_ more stable and reliable than that.