> The language's design is inherently incompatible with use cases that care about speed, because of how deeply in bed it is with HTTP request-response lifecycle.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but it sounds like you're saying that speed doesn't matter when responding to HTTP requests. This couldn't be further from the truth. The less time a response takes, the more requests can be handled per second, which is critical for scaling Web services. PHP 7.x handles 2-3 times as many requests per second on the same hardware compared to PHP 5.
Also, I don't agree that PHP is only suitable for responding to network requests. I've also found it ideal for writing CLI programs which can run on a schedule and share logic with HTTP APIs.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but it sounds like you're saying that speed doesn't matter when responding to HTTP requests. This couldn't be further from the truth. The less time a response takes, the more requests can be handled per second, which is critical for scaling Web services. PHP 7.x handles 2-3 times as many requests per second on the same hardware compared to PHP 5.
Also, I don't agree that PHP is only suitable for responding to network requests. I've also found it ideal for writing CLI programs which can run on a schedule and share logic with HTTP APIs.