[JoshuaDavid]

> What does it do better than other languages?

Shared nothing architecture. If you're using e.g. fastapi you can store some data in memory and that data will be available across requests, like so

    import uvicorn, fastapi
    
    app = fastapi.FastAPI()
    
    counter = {"value": 0}
    
    @app.post("/counter/increment")
    async def increment_counter():
        counter["value"] += 1
        return {"counter": counter["value"]}
    
    @app.post("/counter/decrement")
    async def decrement_counter():
        counter["value"] -= 1
        return {"counter": counter["value"]}
    
    @app.get("/counter")
    async def get_counter():
        return {"counter": counter["value"]}
    
    if __name__ == "__main__":
        import uvicorn
        uvicorn.run(app, host="0.0.0.0", port=9237)

This is often the fastest way to solve your immediate problem, at the cost of making everything harder to reason about. PHP persists nothing between requests, so all data that needs to persist between requests must be explicitly persisted to some specific external data store.

Non-php toolchains, of course, offer the same upsides if you hold them right. PHP is harder to hold wrong in this particular way, though, and in my experience the upside of eliminating that class of bug is shockingly large compared to how rarely I naively would have expected to see it in codebases written by experienced devs.

[secstate]

I hadn't really thought about PHP through this lens. But it's so much a part of where it came from as a preprocessor for text. It was a first-class part the stateless design of the OG internet. Now everyone wants all things persisted all the time, and leads to crazy state problems.

[eduardofcgo]

Also because it's a language for the web, and HTTP is stateless.

[zygentoma]

But that's Python, no?

Edit: Oh, you showed an example against Python! Now I get it!