Which language for which project? PHP, Go, Python, JS — a pragmatic guide

The question comes up at every new project kickoff: "what are we building this in?" More often than not, the answer is driven by what the team already knows, or by whatever is trending on HackerNews this month. Neither is a particularly good method. I've seen a CRM written in Rust because the CTO watched a conference talk, a high-traffic API built in PHP because "that's what we've always done", and a data pipeline in Node.js because the front-end team refused to learn anything else. All three were the wrong call. Here's a more pragmatic framework — no evangelism included. PHP: misunderstood and underrated PHP carries a reputation built on the internet of 2005 to 2012. The problem is that its reputation froze in time while the language kept evolving. PHP 8.x ships with optional strong typing, native attributes, named arguments, enums, fibers, and JIT compilation. It's not the same language that made "PHP bad" jokes go viral. For a classic web application, a REST API, an e-commerce platf