I probably already posted in this discussion, but I cannot remember...
I definitely had a huge love for PHP, and I still do because PROPER php can be extremely efficient & beneficial for a website. Being able to manage / use a database, manage / use files, store & display user data, and do a lot of server-side functions is absolutely incredible. Today I actually wrote a script that I called "LockDir.php" which checks every single /directory/ or /folder/ on the website and makes sure it either has index.php or index.html. The reason for this is because if an index file is not present, Google and other search engines will crawl and index those directories... that is absolutely 100% not ideal if there are pages that should be hidden, scripts that you don't want search engines to trigger/execute, or people to be able to snoop in. As a security measure, having an index.php/index.html inside every single folder on your website can go a long way... so here's the issue. We had a client that used WordPress in the past.... now they do not use it. However, they wanted to keep their uploaded files, so they specifically told us we could not alter or delete the designated uploads folder. We advised them against this and mentioned that we could actually keep their uploads, but secure them with authentication methods for the uploads directory. They did not want to pay any more money, so they opted to keep their old Wordpress files & folders... thats' right... all of them... Not just the uploads directory - EVERYTHING.
Well, today they complained that Google had indexed their PDF uploads (no surprise there).
One of those PDF files had contact details of the people in their organization. That was a huge no-no... So, we went ahead and applied a bunch of security measures (for $$) to make those files inaccessible. However, we were still displeased with this because their server admin likes to add new files and directories (he calls them archives). We wanted to make sure that Google and other search engines could not index the directories/files as a final security measure. However, with WordPress and theme folders, they had literally 879 different folders (without an index.html or index.php file inside of them). I had the choice to either manually right click "create file -> index.php -> copy & paste 'Directory Access Denied' into the file -> save file" or come up with another method. I used PHP to recursively search through every single folder. When it got into a folder, it looked to see if there were any "sub folders". When it went into a "sub folder" it looked for "sub sub folders", and so on and so on. I was able to write 32 lines of code that could look for ANY folder/directory that did not contain either index.php or index.html (to prevent search engines from indexing the files in those directories). With those 32 lines of code, I was able to automatically create the 'index.php' files with the message 'Directory Access Denied' in less than 5 seconds. 879 separate index.php files were created! That's just one example of the power of PHP.
However, my favorite language is JavaScript because of how you can manipulate what the user sees, see what the user does, create browser games, send data to a database, and so much more. Although PHP is vital and amazing for server-side functions like creating files and managing a database, JavaScript is much more fun and incredible boosting user engagement & improving their experience.