I have programmed using Php for at least 25 years. While PHP did start off being quite poorly designed for security, newer versions of Php and also the PHP frameworks like Laravel, Yii etc have become quite sophisticated over the years and is a really good alternative to frameworks like Rails etc.

The CMS frameworks have also improved quite a bit.

The improvements in PHP include big performance gains - PHP 7 was a huge improvement over PHP 5 and now PHP 8 also includes a JIT), improvements in the language such as a type system, object orientation, improved error handling etc.

PHP 8 is a lot faster (about 3x) faster than Python.

https://sailingbyte.com/blog/php5-to-php8-modern-programming...