slikts

Recursion is a powerful, relatively low-level approach, and the price for expressive power is readability, but it has legit use cases. What you said has a grain of truth in that usually you should prefer combinators like map or filter (if you're doing FP), but just throwing away recursion is silly. Having a strong opinion on it and not seeming to know about TCO is also not a good look.

Without modules there can be dependency hell: conflicting subdependency versions, unless all your dependencies update their subdependencies in lockstep.

You mean statically, not strongly typed. Strong typing roughly means avoiding implicit type coercion.

This is a common straw man; PHP 5 and 7 made large strides, but that's because there was so much to fix, and there still is and will continue to be, like lack of first class functions, actual modules, etc. PHP is also unsuitable for persistent processes like serving WebSocket.

Never, since PHP is fundamentally flawed, and trying to redesign it would make the split between Python 2 and 3 pale in comparison. PHP's main selling point is backwards compatibility and the existing ecosystem; a fundamental redesign would remove that. PHP's name is also mud when it comes to programming language design, and its community is notorious for poor practices, so no one's really clamoring for a more modern PHP.

The bitter truth for PHP stans is that it is what it is, you can get things done, and you can have valid reasons for using it (like legacy reasons, job market, etc.), but it's rightfully trending down and will continue to.

I'll rework that section; thanks for the feedback.

"Very slightly" means that I shared that I'd submitted it here; realistically a couple of upvotes could have come from that, but I don't know. The talk about botnets and whatnot is just hyperbole. You inferring alternative accounts and pulling numbers out of thin air is ridiculous.

The wording is indeed pretentious, hopefully improved in future iterations.

It's a major recurring theme; for example, anything that refers to implicit or explicit is part of it. The list you quoted is a placeholder to be elaborated.