PHP

PHP remains one of the web’s most popular server-side languages, powering over 77% of websites including Facebook, Wikipedia, and WordPress through its pragmatic approach to web development that combines ease of learning with powerful features for building dynamic, database-driven applications. This mature scripting language has evolved significantly from its humble beginnings, now offering modern features like type declarations, anonymous classes, and JIT compilation in PHP 8 that deliver performance improvements up to 3x faster while maintaining backward compatibility that protects existing investments. PHP’s ecosystem is unmatched in web development, with frameworks like Laravel providing elegant syntax and powerful features for modern applications, Symfony offering enterprise-grade components, and content management systems like WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla enabling millions of websites worldwide. The language excels at rapid web development with built-in features for session handling, database connectivity supporting MySQL, PostgreSQL, and others, extensive library support through Composer, and deployment simplicity that works on virtually every web host, making it an ideal choice for startups, agencies, and enterprises building everything from simple websites to complex e-commerce platforms and API services.