This is going to be a bit of a rant. I've sat quietly through many articles like this, but now I want to say something.

PHP has been on "life-support" as you say, for 10 years now, if not longer. We see articles like this at least once a month pronoucing PHP as good as dead. Yet somehow, the thing seems to keep chugging along. I'm a long time PHP programmer, and one thing I can tell you is that PHP is nowhere near dead.

To address some of your "disadvanges"...

1. Using "Open Source" as a reason for PHP's alleged insecurities is a huge problem for me. Do you claim the same for Java, Ruby, Python, Swift, parts of ASP.NET or even the Linux Kernel? Being open source is probably what has helped the language be MORE secure. Not less. I can write insecure code in a bunch of other languages, yet for some reason those aren't mentioned?

2. PHP is as scalable as you want it to be. What does "not modular" even mean?

3. There's a few topics in this one statement... Weakly typed? So are many modern languages. That doesn't make a language a bad choice, it just makes it a different choice. Besides, there's ways to work with PHP's type system. Old and new ways? There's always two ways to "skin a cat". There are old versions and new version of C++, JavaSript, Java or any other language. Claiming that there are "too many ways to do the same thing" feels lazy. I feel like a language SHOULD give you a choice.

I think there's a lot wrong with this article, and I feel like some of things you say show you have a misunderstanding of the PHP ecosystem. Laravel has definitely had a massive impact on how PHP is written these days, and Facebook's Hack was probably the kick in the ass the language needed. Without the small pushes it's had in the last few years, you would probably be right. PHP would have been thrown out years ago. But from an insiders perspective, it's only getting stronger.

PHP has a bad rep because of it's passed. But it's not the same language it was 10 years ago. PHP is just a tool like any other language. It has both advantages and disadvantages just like all of the tools we use. It's likely NOT the right tool in many situations, but the same is true for all programming languages.