Same question: Who would take Ruby or Django for a new project when the language is not even existing in public discussion?
But honestly, the main reason is that you can find PHP developers everywhere and they are cheap. Given that you want to build a project that grows and advances, that is maintainable, for which you require a vast ecosystem to kick-start your ideas and a lot of very good tooling and free sources of knowledge, you won't find a better platform than PHP.
Ok, Perl might be an alternatively hugely developed language but it is really complicated to find new developers for it. In contrast, you will find a lot of developers, testers, sysops that have the knowledge for working and administering the PHP tech stack. Yes, you could use the coolest language but how would you be able to pay super expensive Go/Kotlin/Node developers once your company has left start-up mode and is there really any gain from that? The risk to be betting on a dying horse might be too high or, less dramatic, everyone is just cooking with water.
If you want to earn money from your company and not just sell your expensive personell at some point it makes sense to start easy and advance the people you have. If you are building API based systems you are not locking yourself in a technology anyways. Given how flexible and fast-moving technology is today one could probably also find a good argument that you absolutely should always base your projects on PHP.
Because those stacks (Ruby/Django) come with automatic admin sections that let you build quite a bit quickly.
But now instead of exposing it as html pages, you expose your django/ruby models using an api like graphql or rest. So then you can use all new fancy js frameworks like react or vue.js.
Ruby and Django developers are as around as much as PHP developers.
PHP is not my go-to tool, but - you can do the same with Laravel (or a number of other packages). Also, my rough impression is that number of PHP devs outweighs Rails / Django at least 2 to 1.
My experience with PHP programmers is that while there are a lot more of them, there aren't a lot of good ones. I suppose if you're just making a fairly simple, server rendered CRUD app, that shouldn't be a problem...
My experience as a PHP (among other things) developer was that "senior" roles pay half what comparable roles with pretty much any other Web language do.
So I'm not a PHP developer anymore, and haven't been for years. Neither is anyone else with options, I'd guess, unless they've found some rare shop that pays real money for them, which I'm sure do exist. I don't actually hate the language. It's OK for what it does. It's a helluva lot less yak-shavey than most of the other popular web languages, so that's nice. I'd work in it again if it paid alright and I wasn't worried the next role wouldn't (that is, that I was killing my earning potential by gaining yet more years of experience in it).
It's honestly really strange that you'd suggest Rails and Django don't exist in the public conversation. Yes, I literally woke up in the middle of the night thinking about this. Rails 6 is on the verge of release and has nearly 4000 contributors. It powers some of the most valuable companies in the world, and is by far the fastest way to get an API/fancy JS combo up and running. According to Github, there are over 1.1 million projects using Rails. Laravel doesn't report usage, but with 500 contributors there's a disparity in the strength of the communities between the two projects.
Anyhow.
One of my favourite things about the Ruby community is that nobody would ever suggest that we're popular because we're cheap. I don't want to work with people that are an easily replaced commodity. Nobody good is cheap.
Just to note this here as it seems this hasn't been mentioned yet, the Twitch chat is based on IRC. They run their own servers and you have to log in with your Twitch credentials but you can user your usual IRC client to connect to the Twitch IRC.
In addition, special Twitch IRC clients have spawned, like TC [1] or Chatty [2] that include support for Twitch-specifics like Emotes, notifications and direct linking to the associated video streams.
The aim seems to be to create a system that can replace centralized messenger solutions by allowing use of existing IMAP servers or hosting one yourself. I am not sure if this is correct but the article states that they are already supplying the software for three quarters of all IMAP servers worldwide and seem to be interested in connecting with Google to bring this to fruition.
Pretty interesting read (although only German) but it seems the marketing on this topic may have just started.
Looks like native COI compatibility on the server makes life easier for a client, and adds advanced features as opposed to restricting some servers from the party:
>"A COI client should check for COI support from the server first. it will CAPABILITY after having logged into the IMAP service. If the returned capabilities list contains the "COI" capability, then the client does not need to filter messages on the client side. It will also have more advanced options at its disposal, see the server side specifications for details."
The requirements are just an IMAP (or JMAP) server that conforms to the IMAP RFC:
>"The IMAP server may or may not be COI-compatible. The IMAP service MUST be compatible with IMAP v4rev1 as defined in RFC 3501, which is the case for almost any IMAP service in production."
An SMTP service for sending messages. Sending services are also called Mail Transfer Agents (MTAs)."
We have about 7bn total unique active (3 months) accounts in the world, 50-60% is Gmail, Outlook.com, Yahoo and a few more, 40-50% are real IMAP servers, of which 76% use Dovecot. Very large deployments include companies like Comcast, Deutsche Telekom, 1&1, LGI (Ziggo, Virgin Media, UPC) with 10m+ user deployments, and yes, a veeery long tail of millions of small servers and anything in between. But COI will also play fine with GMail and friends.
But honestly, the main reason is that you can find PHP developers everywhere and they are cheap. Given that you want to build a project that grows and advances, that is maintainable, for which you require a vast ecosystem to kick-start your ideas and a lot of very good tooling and free sources of knowledge, you won't find a better platform than PHP.
Ok, Perl might be an alternatively hugely developed language but it is really complicated to find new developers for it. In contrast, you will find a lot of developers, testers, sysops that have the knowledge for working and administering the PHP tech stack. Yes, you could use the coolest language but how would you be able to pay super expensive Go/Kotlin/Node developers once your company has left start-up mode and is there really any gain from that? The risk to be betting on a dying horse might be too high or, less dramatic, everyone is just cooking with water.
If you want to earn money from your company and not just sell your expensive personell at some point it makes sense to start easy and advance the people you have. If you are building API based systems you are not locking yourself in a technology anyways. Given how flexible and fast-moving technology is today one could probably also find a good argument that you absolutely should always base your projects on PHP.