&quot;I would not consider this an advantage per se, because exactly like C, it&#x27;s difficult to find a certain type of programmer who cares about things like performance or has a real understanding of what is happening when their code executes.&quot;<p>I agree. It&#x27;s one of the few things about PHP that you see in both lists of advantages and drawbacks haha.<p>&quot;As far as your points 1, 4, 6, and 7 are concerned - it&#x27;s pretty much on par with other dynamic languages such as Lua or Ruby.&quot;<p>I believe it for 1, 4, and 7 but am skeptical on 6: internal quality and security. The few times I saw people dedicate time to PHP vulnerabilities were finding them 10+ at a time. Lua and Go <i>should</i> do better due to simplicity but I haven&#x27;t verified that. Coverity reported Python having lowest defect rate of about anything at one point. Getting updates on scoring like that vs other dynamic and static languages might be a useful metric. Compared to most web stuff, I&#x27;ll leave 6 at maybe.<p>&quot;Rubyists tend to talk about how speed is not important, which I disagree with, and PHP has never let me down in this regard.&quot;<p>They&#x27;re foolish if so. Definitely a speed advantage for PHP given work (esp Facebook&#x27;s) put into that.<p>&quot;Personally, I think PHP is strongest in fact without using the class system religiously, and instead making major use of its array&#x2F;list type and functional code patterns.&quot;<p>I believe that. It was true for some other languages before. So, that solves 2 but 3 is still on table. Languages supporting strong static analysis, design-by-contract, advanced typing, and so on can do better than a PHP-like language. This includes dynamic ones extended with that stuff. So, 3 is a maybe leaning towards no if against application rather than scripting languages.<p>&quot; PHP&#x27;s unique strength and primary reason for me using it is its execution model in a web server environment. Every other language and web framework has gone the way of the application server, but PHP is using a per-request execution model which is incredibly powerful if used right.&quot;<p>&quot;In exchange for this you get to benefit from a stateless app. If your code, the interpreter, or a library screws up, you&#x27;re not taking down the server with it, you just disrupt the requests that actually hit the bug.&quot;<p>Definitely makes things easier to understand and reduces issues. Certainly an advantage against anything not supporting such a model where it&#x27;s needed. Adds support on 5 given stateless reliability is easier to boost.<p>&quot; there are lots of things this is unsuitable for, especially when you really do need a persistent app server. &quot;<p>That&#x27;s a lot of modern web apps, though, right? I can&#x27;t guess at the percentage but &quot;LAMP stack&quot; implies databases and persistence are the norm.<p>&quot; it can be advantageous to write a small broker-style server in C or Node (or Go, or Erlang, whatever you want), and put the intelligence part in a PHP backend API.&quot;<p>Smart idea. I can see the potential gains. There&#x27;s parallels in highly assured systems where we kernelize critical functionality, implement it robustly, and untrusted stuff just calls it often with interface checks. It&#x27;s a proven method with lots of application. Do you have any resources on doing this right in web applications out of curiosity? Just in case I have to get back into that.<p>Conclusion<p>We started with 7 metrics. Your case showed it&#x27;s roughly comparable to competition in 4&#x2F;7, probably better on 1&#x2F;7, a maybe on 1&#x2F;7, and a stronger maybe (stateless) on 1&#x2F;7. Rather than horrible, with these metrics it comes out as OK in most ways with advantages in some and potential disadvantages in just a few. So, baring new data or metrics, it&#x27;s objectively Ok at this point compared to others with possible advantages in speed or error minimization at component level. I say possible because I&#x27;ve seen competitors do similar things. I&#x27;d do case by case comparisons there but PHP is overall OK based on your data.