All those various regular code popularity surveys place it above Rust and Go.

It’s still the most easily-deployable language to build web apps in, and there’s nothing particularly missing from it now.

Also AI writes it really well (is good at using the latest features etc.), it has a remarkably un-fucked-up package manager, Laravel is fairly easy to work with, etc.

PHP by Larry Ullman happened to be the first programming book I read in 2002. I love PHP and I can understand what Claude is doing with it.