I was specifically refering to PHP. C++ has picked up a lot of speed since 2010, and kept up with modern needs, such as concurrency. C fills the need of being no BS, no runtime, close to hardware. COBOL and FORTRAN are too big to fail.
Why would anyone pick PHP for a new project over, say, Python or NodeJS?
Because I wanted as many non-technical people as possible, running on wing-and-a-prayer, bottom-tier, shared hosting plans, to be able to run the platform I developed.
Why are we even talking about C/C++. This languages are not intended for web. This is software languages. I would never use C/C++ to code a website project. Just like I would never use PHP to code a software. Better comparison would be PHP vs Python or Ruby for example.
Why would anyone pick PHP for a new project over, say, Python or NodeJS?