> It's actually a bit of a red flag to me these days if a developer turns up their nose at PHP.
Depends on the reasons. One good reason for preferring another language is .NET/Java business app developers can earn a lot more here than PHP developers ;)
Oppositely: not being able to articulate the problems with PHP/Laravel compared to a stack of say Kotlin/Ktor or C#/MVC or Java/SpringBoot is a red flag too in my book.
Have worked at a few places where PHP was dumped on because “it doesn’t have threads”. The dumper-folks were also noted to be for spending most of their time trying to fix threading issues (Java, usually). Saw this in person twice, have heard similarly from other colleagues over the years.
I agree “it doesn’t have threads” is a bullshit reason. Especially since it took JS's threadlessness to make evented (aka async, aka promise-based, aka callback-based, aka eventloop-based) mainstream, and for good reasons! It allows many to maximize the compute resources better than possible with the threaded approach.
There are good reasons to avoid/switch-away-from PHP... Like weak compile time quality guarantees, messy std lib, low quality of available libraries, many security issues; all WHILE great alternatives exist for free! (e.g. Kotlin, Rust, C#, Java)
Depends on the reasons. One good reason for preferring another language is .NET/Java business app developers can earn a lot more here than PHP developers ;)