I am an erstwhile PHP apologist. Having come back to PHP after a long time away (not really by choice), I can confirm that the language has improved significantly since PHP5. PSR was a huge success in a lot of ways. However there are still a few things that prevent it from being my language of choice.
First off, there is a surprising number of core behaviors you'd expect from a modern web application that there isn't a clear go-to for in the PHP world. Does anyone know of a well maintained library for publishing and consuming AMQP messages asynchronously?
PHP is still limited by living inside of the context of the request. This has an effect on certain types of application-layer caching, and makes for a poor model for backend scripting.
You also still need to interact with multiple layers of dependency management -- from os packages to pear packages to composer libraries. Configuration can be messy, and many projects still aren't containerized.
Finally, while the language has evolved, many of the projects that use it have not. The longer lived the PHP project, the more likely you are to encounter the exact paradigms that make it so hard to work with. Other languages have benefitted from a much greater percentage of their lifespan being supported by ecosystems that encouraged keeping your dependencies and the parts of your code that exercise them up to date.
That being said, it's great to see that there is a path for starting new projects with a modern framework. But I would have said the same thing about Zend or Symfony, and those seem to have fallen off for reasons I don't know.
Some of your complaints are a little weird.
* The OS package/pear package thing is highly dependent on what language features you want to add to the base language. If you want, you can install all those features with pear. It's just easier to install with OS packages.
* Composer used to add libraries to your code base
* The fact that "many projects still aren't containerized" has nothing to do with PHP. I doubt there are many languages where that statement isn't true.
* No idea why you think Symfony has fallen off. Laravel has large chunks of Symfony code inside it and the project is going strong with regular releases.
First off, there is a surprising number of core behaviors you'd expect from a modern web application that there isn't a clear go-to for in the PHP world. Does anyone know of a well maintained library for publishing and consuming AMQP messages asynchronously?
PHP is still limited by living inside of the context of the request. This has an effect on certain types of application-layer caching, and makes for a poor model for backend scripting.
You also still need to interact with multiple layers of dependency management -- from os packages to pear packages to composer libraries. Configuration can be messy, and many projects still aren't containerized.
Finally, while the language has evolved, many of the projects that use it have not. The longer lived the PHP project, the more likely you are to encounter the exact paradigms that make it so hard to work with. Other languages have benefitted from a much greater percentage of their lifespan being supported by ecosystems that encouraged keeping your dependencies and the parts of your code that exercise them up to date.
That being said, it's great to see that there is a path for starting new projects with a modern framework. But I would have said the same thing about Zend or Symfony, and those seem to have fallen off for reasons I don't know.