It is called the long tail. PHP is only language with okay CMSs. The reason for it is the hosting model. It is easy way how to give someone package of files and they can buy their own managed hosting, put the files there and they have website.
Its all the tiny businesses restaurants, schools, fan sites. Sites with 5 visitors a day. Probably like 50% of web is this.
You can hate PHP all you want but there is no tech that does this better (maybe serverless one day). And PHP cmses are in completely different league compared to anything else unfortunately. Things like Craft, Kirby, Bolt or even Wordpress nothing unfortunately compares.
Of course people here are gonna hate on it and i hate PHP as much as anyone but when you are living from making websites for 500eur and you need to make 3 a month then it is hard to beat.
I've programmed PHP professionally for the last 10 years (among others), modern PHP written by professionals is markedly better than it used to be and the PHP devs should get credit for that.
What's all this emotionalization of the situation?
In the end PHP is a tool. And despite the constant whining, it has created a great many projects people want to use and use (by choice).
When you create an as good alternative for people's actual needs (and not what you consider people's needs to be, like "elegant code") we can see if we can get them to switch to that.
Professionals use tools. Whiners and amateurs complain about ideals.
>I cannot think of PHP companies as something else than a no-innovation, no-research, no-interest & no change since 2000's.
Is this supposed to be satire?
>Now please tell me what I can do with PHP, I want to see newcomers read what options you have by learning PHP.
You get access to a turn-key, widely supported, language and ecosystem, that powers close to 80% of the web. Including extremely popular CMS options. Plus, access to some of the cheapest hosting you can find. You can also write all kinds of backend and cli stuff in it if you want.
And you can always use ANOTHER TOOL for a different job, if PHP is not suitable. What a concept huh? Who would have thought.
I wouldn't voluntarily start any new project in PHP, but that doesn't change the massive amounts of existing PHP code that can benefit from an investment in security.
PHP is (sadly) not going anywhere for a long time.
Also, as others mentioned, it's just so easy to host PHP based solutions like WP etc that you can't reasonably recommend anything else to a non-technical user.
Even someone clueless can figure out how to host something with PHP on cheap shared hosting with a little internet research.
Good luck doing the same thing with Python or Ruby or even Rust.
As the sibling comment also says the strength of PHP is the hosting offerings. I use PHP only, because it's trivial to create smaller sites with it on cheap shared hosting, because PHP hosting is offered practically unversally everywhere.
For bigger companies which host their own sites, other languages may be better choices.
