I can think of many reasons, but for starters (obviously focused on web dev): - pythons dependency management is insane. For PHP Composer seems a bit aged, but compared to all others i've had to work with in the last decade, it's still the best to work with

- the PSRs are pretty good & make the whole language seem like a good big framework

- php can actually be very fast nowadays

- decent type system (if you're unlike me any don't hate working with annotations, you'll be even happier)

- since php8 (especially 8.1 and 8.2) there were a lot of major new things (property promotion, named parameters)

On the contrary: - php.ini must die. It's not causing much issues for me anymore, but it just doesn't feel right.

I don't know why, but no matter how much i work in other languages, even if i really enjoy them (eg. go), nothing when starting from scratch for web server stuff, i always end up going with PHP. Whenever it's "just web" on the serverside, nothing beats php. Especially when you ignore the bad stuff and look at really well designed modern projects based on php8.

I just think it might be time to fork php8, start with a new name & get rid of all the old, dirty stuff that's still there for some weird & non-realistic backward compatibility.

If anyone is up for that task, i am happy to help & finance parts of that.