A fairly useful addendum to your list might be 4) both have grown up into completely ok languages.
If you, like me and many others, shrugged them both of for years and came back to them pleasantly surprised, it might change the timbre when reading that.
I'm not sure I agree that it's the best but it's got some things going for it:
- incredibly fast to deploy and iterate
- supported in some fashion on more hosting solutions than other languages or compiled binaries
- one of the best performing interpreted languages
Not all of these benefits apply to me so I don't use PHP but under the right circumstances I'd look at it again.
Find me a language without a few of those classic 'wat' quirks. They almost all have them.
PHP was quite fairly maligned for a long time. The issue was never "weirdness" but rather poor design. Starting with final 5.x they started turning it around and deprecating or fixing a lot of the worst bits.
JavaScript was a joke but modern js is tight, clean and generally very fast.
If you, like me and many others, shrugged them both of for years and came back to them pleasantly surprised, it might change the timbre when reading that.
I'm not sure I agree that it's the best but it's got some things going for it:
- incredibly fast to deploy and iterate
- supported in some fashion on more hosting solutions than other languages or compiled binaries
- one of the best performing interpreted languages
Not all of these benefits apply to me so I don't use PHP but under the right circumstances I'd look at it again.