It's interesting that everyone's still using rails in silicon valley. Here in the UK, Laravel (PHP) and Django (python) are both more popular than Rails for new projects. But I hear that PHP isn't popular at all in the US?
PHP in the U.S., especially in the startup world, is seen as "oh, you develop in third world countries". That's the perception these days unfortunately.
That said, I was an avid PHP developer in the U.S. about 10-15 years ago and I always liked the language. There's just no one learning PHP anymore since all the kids just learn js, and no one trying out "hipster" languages like ruby/crystal/go/python/elixr/d/nim/rust/etc is going to try crusty old PHP.
I will say though that PHP, without any frameworks, is probably my favorite thing to develop a simple standalone site specifically because it lets you break all conventions and just output some damn content possibly with some simple logic involved and without using classes/mvc/etc.
