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Make fun of PHP as much as I like or liked to. But I have some easily readable, rock-solid, easily operated php applications in my infrastructure.

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I believe good architectures/stacks depend far more on the skill of the architects than the languages involved. Domain fit also matters.

As far as PHP, it's an ugly language from a language-only perspective, but easy to deploy and has lots of existing web-oriented libraries/functions. Think of PHP has a glue language for its libraries and some front-end JavaScript to improve the UI. Python and server-side JavaScript may someday catch up, but still have a lot of ground to make up.

PHP might be not the best designed or nice looking language out there, but you cannot even compare it to JS. It has real classes, doesn't require you to put underscore before private methods and type checking. And it issues a warning if you divide by zero or try to access array index that doesn't exist

Is `empty("0")` still true in PHP?

"blank" and "empty" are not the same thing in PHP. If you expect them to be, then you read the manual wrong. I generally include a set of common utilities where I define my own "isBlank()" function, which trims before comparing. There are different definitions of "blank" such that one size may not fit all. (Consider tabs and line-feed characters, for example.)

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