I’ve personally always found PHP easy to work with for very simple websites where you still need some degree of server side rendering, but not enough to break out a full MVC web framework like Spring or Django (though it might just be nostalgia since PHP is the first programming language I seriously learned. I also like how PHP is plug and play with web servers like Apache and Nginx, where a single line in the configuration file can tell it to just use the PHP interpreter for every PHP file it serves, with no other daemons running the web app or reverse proxies to connect to a backend server.

I know Facebook’s Hack is an alternative, but are there others? Are there any that are not its own programming language but allow you to inject code from a more popular programming language like Python or Java into a PHP-like page? A final requirement would be that it’s still being maintained.