Reasons why to use PHP:

- You know how to use it (syntax, what it can do etc.)
- You've learned its ecosystem, package management, standards
- You can achieve results using PHP and complete projects while adhering to deadlines

Ruby doesn't offer anything substantial that would justify the switch. I'm all for developers honing their skills, but business does not exist to cater to developer's whims. Business exists to provide value to clients and put food on employee's table. Being nitpicky about the language and doing language swap is very expensive, especially when you swap language A with language B and gain literally nothing. For smaller businesses or one man shows, it's trivial to start a new project and use a different language.

I've seen fair share of superficial analysis and loud comments made by people who are not engineers, judging by their behavior. Like any language, PHP can be misused; and often is misused. It became a rite of passage to belittle PHP. Reading or hearing comments that attack certain technology without objective reasons merely means the person doing it is toxic and should be avoided in general. I dislike plenty of things in PHP / Python / Golang, but I would never dream of whining about it; instead, I try to reach out to maintainers and make suggestions to help make improvements.

Having written a few things, here's why you PHP is still appealing (this does not mean other languages cannot do this):

- it's sufficiently fast for CRUD-y applications. Bottleneck is usually I/O, but scaling horizontally is not an issue anymore, therefore performance doesn't have to be an issue.
- it's feature rich, type system received massive improvements and continues to improve
- it has more than 1 framework to choose from (Symfony, Laravel, CodeIgniter, Phalcon, Aphiria, Yii, Zend Framework and the list goes on)
- there's an async framework available, called swoole. It's an extension to PHP written in C++ and it brings async capabilities to the play. It's sufficiently quick and allows for building different types of applications: like web socket server or communication-oriented servers.
- new Foreign Functions Interface allows for experienced / polyglot developers to extend their apps in an easier manner opposed to writing extensions in C

With technologies like containerization, it became trivial to distribute PHP applications and avoid long setup times and reading the manuals on how to make something work. Not everyone use those technologies, but it's what's available and end result can be that you distribute a container image, which for all intents and purposes, means that you deal with a single "file" (thought I want to get across is that app distribution can be made extremely simple).

Question that poses itself is this: what reason is there to move away from PHP? Personal preference - I understand it, and this is what pushed me to try other languages and technologies out.

If you've got substantial performance, mature ecosystem, plenty of libraries, plenty of frameworks to choose from, great language features, async capabilities and ability to use the language for things other than CRUD-y applications - why use a different language that will ultimately merely let you do the same?