What might surprise him/her even more is that PHP is actually better than js/react at anything web related. Symfony and Laravel are amazing frameworks. You get frontend scaffolding and admin generation,fast templating languages, authentication, authorization, databases, great tooling. On top of that PHP 8.0 improved the type system and these frameworks are quickly adapting to use types everywhere.
When it comes to web applications tho, Django is not as pollished as Laravel/Symfony. There is no webpack integration (or any other npm frontend tool). built-in authentication is very basic, hosting is a pain.
The thing is a haven't written a single line of code in Django, but modern PHP and it's ecosystem looks more fun from a front-end, JS developer's perspective
> but the tooling in PHP is amateur hour by comparison
Looks like maybe the ignorance goes both ways? People really underestimate the size and maturity of the PHP web development ecosystem and it's professional community, and there's no shortage of tooling to build and support apps on the language.
Composer shored up package management. Laravel and Symfony offer robust framework ecosystems. PHP 7 bridged the performance gap with HHVM. Libraries for a wide-range of critical infrastructure services from databases (Postgres, MySQL, Elasticache, Redis) to messaging systems (AMQP, Kafka, ) to monitoring and observability (New Relic/DataDog, Prometheus, Sentry). Cloud support is ubiquitous.
Even the top packages are pedestrian things like logging, event dispatching, sub-process management, and testing.
But PHP has a Microsoft-level of baggage, and those bridges can't be unburned.
When it comes to web applications tho, Django is not as pollished as Laravel/Symfony. There is no webpack integration (or any other npm frontend tool). built-in authentication is very basic, hosting is a pain.
The thing is a haven't written a single line of code in Django, but modern PHP and it's ecosystem looks more fun from a front-end, JS developer's perspective