The PHP Criticism You've Never Actually Thought Through

TL;DR — I've been writing PHP for 15 years. I've tried Ruby, Groovy, and Java. I came back each time. This article goes through the serious criticisms of PHP — stdlib inconsistency, the stateless model, no real async — and where each one actually holds up, and where it doesn't. I've been writing PHP for over 15 years. I've tried Ruby, Groovy, and Java — not out of curiosity, but because I genuinely questioned whether PHP was the right tool. I came back each time. Not out of habit, but because the arguments against PHP rarely survive contact with reality. Let me go through the serious ones. And where PHP genuinely falls short, I'll say so. First, some context most critics skip The people who say PHP can't evolve stopped paying attention around 2005. The language kept moving without them. PHP was created in 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf. It didn't start as a programming language — it was a set of scripts to monitor visits to his online résumé. Built to solve a