Another big bonus for PHP to me is: there are plenty of people who are comfortable with it. Most things aren't genius-scientist-required kind of things where you lock some genius in a room for eighteen months and they revolutionize the industry. Most things are pretty average and you just need somebody with a good understanding of the problem and experience to do them. You'll want plenty of those people to get things done, and using a very common tool helps with having a large pool of people you can call upon.

From a business perspective this might also translate into lower development costs and easier access to talent.

Generally lower quality talent. That's half the reason PHP got its abysmal reputation. Brilliant programmers using PHP must be annoyed that they're thusly tarnished. I suppose that's not so different from JS. To the flames with both of them, though, I find them genuinely depressing languages to work with.

> Generally lower quality talent.

Which is totally fine btw. Most work isn't "we're engineering a new motor for a F1 race car", most work is "this car's motor is broken, replace it". You don't need a CS degree and brilliance to write code that deals with databases and APIs, which is the super majority of code.

You need smart people that spend a lot of time on difficult problems to create strategies that are easy to follow and tooling that is easy to use. And then you just need a lot of people using those tools and applying those strategies to real world problems.

What good is it if you have something that allows those that fully grasp it to write things ten times as fast, but you only have 10 people that can actually do that? I'd much rather pick something where I have ten million people that can use it, the output is just so much higher, and you don't get single points of failure because the one guy in your city that knows that language and does freelance work has decided to move on to a different language.

Our abstractions become the basis of our imagination - do we want developers to think and experience joy? Do we want their minds to spark and innovate and solve and embrace the full power of computing? Can anything compare with the illuminating glow of a powerful abstraction that reveals a new technique - perhaps not 'world changing' - that improves our software and our programmatic structures?

I guess we don't, actually. Oh well. :'). You make a perfectly reasonable business point.

And business is, imho, not just "for profit", but society in general. I feel about it similar as I feel about wood working mastery. Creating incredible joints with extreme attention to detail and a lot of experience fascinates me. But to build furniture for more than one person a year, I'd prefer nails, power tools and a bunch of people that are experienced enough not to nail parts of their body to the wood.

If we want to provide something to the masses, we'll have to provide something that can be used by the masses, not just by a highly trained elite. PHP is mass production development. It's not necessarily elegant (though you can do a lot in it, it doesn't have to be as messy as WP is), but it gets the job done AND it empowers large groups by being easy to learn and not requiring advanced understanding before you can actually achieve something with it.

I do still believe that we want experts that do the kind of work you're describing though. But I believe they shouldn't distance themselves from the ordinary people, but instead find their elegant solutions and then give them a handle so that the uninitiated can use them. Tooling is leverage, individually but even more so collectively. Imho, if you're a brilliant computer scientist and you work on "normal" real world problems, you're wasting your talent. Even if you find the greatest thing that runs 100 times as fast as the previous one, you've sped up one thing out of a million. Instead, build something that'll enable normal people to speed up their projects by factor two, your impact will be immeasurable.

I think that that's also a good point. It makes me wonder about the useful limits of abstraction if accessibility (broadly defined) is the goal.

>> You don't need a CS degree and brilliance

PHP does a terrible job of weeding out the terrible hack programmers. For some reason, people have no problem going into a PHP codebase and monkeying around with it, where something like Rails or Java will at least intimidate them and make them think twice.

Some (perhaps even most) problems don't need top tier coders, so hiring them for such problems is a waste of resources.

This. I was using TypeScript for anything that looked like I'll be the sole maintainer but for something that could last for 10+ years, I started it out as PHP as I may not be the only maintainer one day and can't ask the client to look for more specialized talents for no good reason.

I'd say typescript is easily far enough into mainstream adoption that you can safely use it knowing others will be able to maintain it in the future.

Well yeah, if you would pick one technology that even PHP would compare favourably too, it would be Node... my thoughts on Node were always: just because Google built V8, which makes it possible to run JS fast enough to use it in the backend, doesn't mean that you have to do it.

Regarding frameworks: of course PHP has an advantage there, because it's a more mature ecosystem. But frameworks written in PHP like Symfony or Laravel tend to forget that they are based on a scripting language (which years of optimization have made very fast for a scripting language, but still), so using their features extensively will slow down your application...