20: PHP is awesome even though it sucks

 Let's face it. PHP isn't exactly the most cutting edge of programming languages. It is also not very well designed... Or, designed at all. And yes, the syntax can be pretty odd at times. But despite all of those things it's still genuinely a pretty great programming language. Because of one simple reason: it lets you get shit done. First up: PHP has a built in function for pretty much everything you can think of. This is in contrast to nodejs, where you need to download external packages for pretty much everything. This doesn't sound like a big deal, but it compromises your security. Would you rather trust a package maintained by some guy on npm or a function that's part of the core library of the language and thus has a ton more eyes on it? At least for me, it's the latter. Next up: it's boring. While using the js framework of the week is fun, and the right choice a lot of the time, there's something to be said about the stability of php. Yes, they're still adding stuff and fixing bugs, but you can be pretty confident that updating your php version isn't going to break your entire app, because it's an established programming language at this point. There's not going to be any big breaking changes that need you to rewrite a bunch of stuff. Lastly: PHP doesn't care. It will let you do literally anything, it's probably the last opinionated programming language out there. Yes, that does mean dealing with some deeply weird behaviour occasionally, but let's be honest. It's just kind of fun. Want all your arrays to start at -7.31? Sure, why not. Want to execute a string as a function? Fuck it, there's first class support for that. Want to add 1 to the letter f? Yup, you can do that. Should you? No, what the fuck, why would you ever want to do any of that? But you can. And i just think that's pretty neat.