Appreciate the comment, but to be clear I haven't worked on a PHP project professionally in over 6 years.
I wouldn't say my professional identity is tied to PHP. I don't even consider it my strongest language anymore because I haven't used it day-in day-out for years, plus the vast majority of my professional experience came prior to PHP 7 and Laravel. I'm more of a PHP 5 + Zend guy.
I use PHP for personal projects simply because I find I'm much more productive with it. Emotionally I love writing Java & TypeScript code because I find both to be beautifully designed languages. PHP is fine and to your point, I have grown to love it in a lot of ways. I do love working with Laravel though, but that's not because of PHP, but just because every 10 minutes I'm thinking, "holy crap, that was easy". Everything you'd want is there and works and it all works as you'd expect.
Java "beautifully designed"? Java 19 still can't parse a regex properly, ie. without having to escape metacharacters. Which other commonly-used language has such a lousy regex implementation?
I wouldn't say my professional identity is tied to PHP. I don't even consider it my strongest language anymore because I haven't used it day-in day-out for years, plus the vast majority of my professional experience came prior to PHP 7 and Laravel. I'm more of a PHP 5 + Zend guy.
I use PHP for personal projects simply because I find I'm much more productive with it. Emotionally I love writing Java & TypeScript code because I find both to be beautifully designed languages. PHP is fine and to your point, I have grown to love it in a lot of ways. I do love working with Laravel though, but that's not because of PHP, but just because every 10 minutes I'm thinking, "holy crap, that was easy". Everything you'd want is there and works and it all works as you'd expect.