Comment by juangacovas

My experience: coming from programming in C, then doing web-scripting with Perl, then PHP 4 through 5, 7 and 8 versions, it's been delightful. Big improvements in speed, ecosystem, very nice backwards compatibility in general (which is hard to do), and keeps being a flexible, multi-paradigm language. About frameworks, you can do things now like-ruby-on-rails with Laravel, like-java with Symfony, or just use any custom solution you see to fit better for team/yourself. Mantra: you can do shit code with any language, and PHP is flexible enough to let you organize projects the right way.