> You seem to be referring to an area where people pay pennies + have almost zero programming experience so they want to launch a project with clicks.
Over my career, I've worked with companies using PHP in sales. One of those had over a million customer subscriptions, the other was a multi-national looking at PHP for a greenfield e-commerce project. I noticed working in Europe some high-growth agencies that use PHP.
> So tell me again, why should I use PHP? How will it truly help me? What does it do better than everyone else?
> But I thought we were discussing the actual programming?
Your original question just said "use PHP". PHP is a general purpose web scripting language. It's similar to Python or Ruby. It is generally more performant and later versions have a gradual type system. It's traditionally run as a shared-nothing single-threaded script, which makes it easy to reason about, and in real life has proved to be a stable way to run things in production, as it avoid bugs that can arise around stale state, multi-threading and it keeps running if other libraries have bugs that leak memory.
Later versions have introduced a JIT and support for concurrency concepts such as fibres, as in the upcoming PHP 8.1 https://php.watch/versions/8.1/fibers.
Arguably, the thing that would make you use it over Python, or Ruby, is the ecosystem, especially around content management and e-commerce, as the language itself is roughly comparable to others. Also I think there are more agencies that support PHP, rather than Python or Ruby.
