All web devs used JavaScript because browsers forced us to. PHP is, and has always been, a choice.

As compile-to-JS has matured, many of us have switched to things like TypeScript. That kinda ruins your glib analogy.

Are you saying PHP has improved the way JavaScript has over the last decade?

The improvements in both the language/community plus how people are using JS since The Good Parts was quite a significant improvement.

But people largely went through that whole process because of the ubiquity of browsers not because JS was a good idea. There are so many better alternatives on the server side for web, I don’t see the point in PHP going through that whole renovation unless it’s to hire more and cheaper developers.

> I don’t see the point in PHP going through that whole renovation unless it’s to hire more and cheaper developers.

and may be being cheaper to hire is a bigger importance than you'd care to admit. After all, the person paying the bills wants it to be as low as possible whilst still achieving the result. And they call the shots.

10 years ago, PHP was a good choice for small projects because hosting was much easier and there weren't a lot of cheap outsourced developers for other back-end languages. These days neither of those points is true.

PHP developers are cheap because in general they're very junior. Junior Javascript developers are cheap too.

if you are still selling work based on language and not solutions then you are still jr level as well.

I have worked a lot in JavaScript before and I am pretty up to date with it. Recently I had to pick up PHP for work. I am tempted to say that PHP has become better than JavaScript. I was shock at the improvements.

That’s why people are either compiling from better languages like TypeScript or from modern JS via babel.

Browsers hold figurative guns to our head forcing us to use JavaScript.

Yeah, there’s no reason a sane person should choose either of those.

But you can add extensions which make get rid of the inconsistencies and lets you treat it like you a in a modern version (Babel/etc).

But Javascript is compiled in the browser, by many browsers, and so is hard to nail down an environment.

PHP runs on the server which is pretty much a fixed environment. It has more options to it yet it feels like it hasn't made use of it.