[srb24]

"I'm pretty open for the language" - with the greatest respect you should checkout the relevant cost per hour for freelance devs for various languages - I think you will fimd that PHP generally wins (regardless of its faults) once you start growing hiring staff you may find you've tripled your wage bill if you use something "cool" but not "common" eg Scala, Erlang, Julia etc etc

[Zababa]

Small story about that: I know someone that works in a small/medium company (~70 people) that started as a startup. The initial dev team was made of Scala devs, that used a microservice architecture. After a few years, Scala devs became too expansive for the company, so they slowly replaced them with PHP devs. The PHP devs weren't the best around, so they built a buggy and stateful monolith [1]. Now they are slowly switching to TypeScript with Nest and Next, again in a microservice pattern, with more experienced developers. They're trying to slowly replace the monolith (strangler pattern I think?). A few Scala microservices are still around, which takes an expensive dev to manage.

I don't have any conclusion about that story.

[1]: Important mention: "monolith" here isn't correlated with "buggy and stateful", you can build a stateless and bug-free monolith, just like you can build stateful and buggy microservices. It just happens to be the pattern they developed.

[sweeneyrod]

It is quite possible that an Erlang dev billing 3x more than a PHP dev will be more than 3x as productive.