I still love PHP and JavaScript

It misses that Good Software is cheap to maintain and can easily have features added.

This goal is hard to meet and there are lots of ways to get there. You can get there with PHP and JavaScript but both languages allow developers to create a mess. Don't get me wrong all languages allow developers to create a mess but these are on the end of the spectrum that requires more tooling to avoid a mess.

I'm a huge fan of strict typing. Because I make lots of stupid errors. Spelling mistakes in variables, that sort of thing. My brain seems to function well at the high level of problem solving but no so well at the details (you might be able to tell from my grammar). Strong typing helps me immensely. Many people don't have this struggle so would rather work with a language that doesn't require the same hoops to jump through. They can do it in manually, and it frustrates them to have to setup types that offer them no value. But for me, to build good software that is easy to maintain, I'll lean on the type system. It will help prevent my mistakes.

So I try to avoid JavaScript. It's more difficult for me to maintain than a strongly typed language. I love Typescript as it fills that gap for me.

PHP is not as bad as it's reputation but old poorly written PHP is. I once witnessed a developer come in an update a legacy code base such that it could be tested. I didn't understand why he spent months working on it. I didn't think it would pay off when there were so many important features to get out. His work completely turned that horrible mess into something maintainable.

I guess my point is that new languages are desirable as they can bring down the cost of maintenance. Some of my favorites are TypeScript and F#. TypeScript is a mainstream way to put the training wheels back on JavaScript and F# is like a dream to use. With Fable, FableRemoting and the Elmish architecture I love it for frontend. It's a hard sell because it's so niche but it's great.

Edit: After reading my comment I felt it was more negative than I'd intended. I liked the article and think the author makes good points, I was just adding my two cents.

When it comes to interpreted languages (perl, python, ruby, js), PHP is hands down the fastest.

I always have a hard time understanding what exactly is meant with comments like these. We can all agree that PHP has a wildly uneven standard library, had its fair share of security-relevant footguns, tends to have unexperienced developers. That's not extremely different from python and node.js, for example.

The language significantly cleaned up its act, it has had classes, traits, closures, introspection, namespaces, packages for well over 10 years now, a robust third party library ecosystem and many successful projects to build upon (wordpress, drupal, woocommerce, phpbb, etc...). This makes it a pretty good choice for many applications.

The stateless model and the resulting "no crazy stuff" approach makes it a much more reasonable choice for web development than say, python+django or ruby+rails to me. There's nothing I loathe more than trying to find which duck-typing, method-injecting package is causing a slow-burn memory leak in production.

I also don't understand where the "most web technology is terrible" stance comes from. I find the quality of software engineering and the care put into developer UX and productivity in the web world quite inspiring. It has been a forcing function on all programmer tooling since the cambrian explosion in the earlier 2010s.