Is PHP still popular or getting old? Has it become a classy programming language?

I started working with PHP many years ago. I was 15 years old, and I didn’t have any formal education or knowledge about programming or engineering. I was just curious about it. Initially, I used it to send emails with the help of mail() function, and then I started to work with forms and slowly learned control structures. By the time I went to university, I was familiar with basic programming and a few OOP features. By the time I finished university, I was able to work with frameworks such as CakePHP, I knew about ORM, dependency injection, and design patterns. Over the years, I worked with Symfony, starting from 1.2 to 4, but I also worked with other languages such as Ruby, JAVA, and GO. After working with GO for the past six months, I want to evaluate PHP — is it still popular or getting old? Is it maturing and extending, or is it ignored?

PHP is the most popular language for web applications, and after 25 years, it’s still powering many websites worldwide. Popularity and maturity for a programming language are challenging to define, and to keep it simple, this post will focus just a little on business trends, features, and emerging technologies.

The new features added to a programming language reflect how it’s used and what it’s aspirations are. Looking at changelogs provides valuable information about the community’s focus. If the community is busy with solving bugs and issues, then you’d probably want to think twice, both as a developer and…