First, I am not a PHP fan, but I will absolutely stick up for the "its good now".
Yes, absolutely no debate the old PHP 4.x/5.x was shocking. However to give PHP their due, they absolutely did make serious efforts in 7.x/8.x. They deserve due recognition for that.
Unfortunately lots of people – I'm guessing you're one of them – still have battle-scars from 4.x/5.x and they think (incorrectly) that 7.x/8.x is "more of the same".
Second "joke language", well, cast your mind back to what else was available at the time... ColdFusion, CGI, ASPX ... it was not exactly a beautiful world back then.
Sure, to borrow your terminology, the Java fans will be along soon to tell us all how awesome Java is for the web. But many of us still bear battle-scars of the horrors of Java stacktraces, messing around with incomprehensible XML config files, Java's penchant for eating RAM for breakfast, and generally trying to figure out why the hell Tomcat is not working (again !).
Pffft. VRML is the whole game, baby! Once everyone runs out and gets an SGI oxygen, Nobody is going to use freaking web browsers ever again. I mean, HTML, what a joke.
Classic ASP was the more direct competitor to PHP, while ASP.net came along later, as part of a next generation of web server languages/frameworks/platforms.
The other option I was actually offered was in machine learning and categorisation, but I avoid it as it was obviously a dead end lol.
well, there's no Java2Shell at least.
Unless you count the XML dependency management with Maven, which isn't too bad.
I suspect the only thing that's changed is that Oracle now charge you for the pleasure. ;)
More seriously though, its been a long time since I've touched Java, but I suspect the only thing that's changed is that its all hidden in magical kubernetes containers these days.
Although that was more connected to the performance improvements through Zend Engine than language sanity or robustness, at the time.
You’re missing the point. Those are all dead. The implication is that PHP should have had the same fate.
That's a C language error, not a PHP language error. I don't see that CVE as particularly different from when they showed python's dictionaries could be attacked using dictionary hash-collision (something that also affected PHP). It's worse in being remotely executable, rather than merely a denial of service, but it's ultimately a facet of the C implementation rather than something wrong with the language itself. CVEs, even remote ones, will happen. Even java had its logging execution attack.
I've made fun of plenty of things in PHP over time, but the language hit the mark it was aiming for initially. It was easy. A 12 year old could sit down and write an ugly little forum and it would work. Because it was easy for amateurs, a lot of amateurs wrote in it, and there's a ton of clumsy code out there. Because it was easy to setup and run with minimal setup, popular packages were very popular. Wordpress vulnerabilities matter because it was very easy for programming chop shops to hack out tons of websites for all the millions of little businesses out there that didn't often follow up on patching etc once that was done. PHP was bad largely for the same reason BASIC was bad. It was easy.
PHP being easy gives it a huge blast radius for anything that goes wrong with its implementation or popular frameworks and libraries.
(I say this as someone who enjoys C programming)