Y but it's so slow to evolve it's just sad. We've being using hacked on "traits solution" since 2006 (via build script) and PHP only got traits in 2012 and on and on. A lot of things that could make it more modern get shutdown.
Modern for the sake of modern isn't needed for a good app.
Especially a web app.
Stability, availability of developers, and ease of debugging however are important. PHP has those. Granted it's not the only one, and I think there are better alternatives, but it's really easy to write a good app in PHP.
Bad coding practices and bad application design will make ANY app have bad code. PHP just historically had a lot of that.
