You really can&#x27;t answer this question?<p>&gt; So what&#x27;s changed in the last few years that makes it 100% as good as Ruby or Python for web development?<p>That seems like it should be pretty straightforward.<p>&gt; One could say the same things comparing something like Python to Smalltalk, and yet Python is fine as it is.<p>If you&#x27;ve already dropped the standard from &quot;100% as good as&quot; to &quot;fine as it is&quot;, then I think you&#x27;ve answered my question. Nobody&#x27;s denying that PHP is a perfectly cromulent language; things get built in it. The servers hum, pages render, revenue is made. For its audience, it&#x27;s fine as it is.
fine
But as far as language quality, developer experience, or aesthetic quality goes, I think PHP&#x27;s kind of a mess. I don&#x27;t mind that people don&#x27;t care about the things that Eevee raises. Different strokes for different folks, after all. But I care about them.<p>Personally, having spent the last year writing Python, I agree that it&#x27;s fine, that it&#x27;s adequate. But I think it&#x27;s often no better than adequate. The object orientation is bolted on and a bit clumsy, there are 70-or-so global functions that mostly should go objects, the inclusion stuff is kinda broken, there&#x27;s a bunch of stuff that looks like Java envy, etc.<p>Given that&#x27;s how I feel about Python, which is honestly fine, you could imagine why I think PHP looks like a novice in the 90s ate a half-dozen random O&#x27;Reily books and then threw up in a compiler. For people who do almost all their work in that language, have high detail memory, and are on the naturalist end of the naturalist&#x2F;theorist spectrum, I think that&#x27;s ok; they&#x27;ll get by happily. I&#x27;m just none of those things.