Same question: Who would take Ruby or Django for a new project when the language is not even existing in public discussion?
But honestly, the main reason is that you can find PHP developers everywhere and they are cheap. Given that you want to build a project that grows and advances, that is maintainable, for which you require a vast ecosystem to kick-start your ideas and a lot of very good tooling and free sources of knowledge, you won't find a better platform than PHP.
Ok, Perl might be an alternatively hugely developed language but it is really complicated to find new developers for it. In contrast, you will find a lot of developers, testers, sysops that have the knowledge for working and administering the PHP tech stack. Yes, you could use the coolest language but how would you be able to pay super expensive Go/Kotlin/Node developers once your company has left start-up mode and is there really any gain from that? The risk to be betting on a dying horse might be too high or, less dramatic, everyone is just cooking with water.
If you want to earn money from your company and not just sell your expensive personell at some point it makes sense to start easy and advance the people you have. If you are building API based systems you are not locking yourself in a technology anyways. Given how flexible and fast-moving technology is today one could probably also find a good argument that you absolutely should always base your projects on PHP.
Just to note this here as it seems this hasn't been mentioned yet, the Twitch chat is based on IRC. They run their own servers and you have to log in with your Twitch credentials but you can user your usual IRC client to connect to the Twitch IRC.
In addition, special Twitch IRC clients have spawned, like TC [1] or Chatty [2] that include support for Twitch-specifics like Emotes, notifications and direct linking to the associated video streams.
The aim seems to be to create a system that can replace centralized messenger solutions by allowing use of existing IMAP servers or hosting one yourself. I am not sure if this is correct but the article states that they are already supplying the software for three quarters of all IMAP servers worldwide and seem to be interested in connecting with Google to bring this to fruition.
Pretty interesting read (although only German) but it seems the marketing on this topic may have just started.
But honestly, the main reason is that you can find PHP developers everywhere and they are cheap. Given that you want to build a project that grows and advances, that is maintainable, for which you require a vast ecosystem to kick-start your ideas and a lot of very good tooling and free sources of knowledge, you won't find a better platform than PHP.
Ok, Perl might be an alternatively hugely developed language but it is really complicated to find new developers for it. In contrast, you will find a lot of developers, testers, sysops that have the knowledge for working and administering the PHP tech stack. Yes, you could use the coolest language but how would you be able to pay super expensive Go/Kotlin/Node developers once your company has left start-up mode and is there really any gain from that? The risk to be betting on a dying horse might be too high or, less dramatic, everyone is just cooking with water.
If you want to earn money from your company and not just sell your expensive personell at some point it makes sense to start easy and advance the people you have. If you are building API based systems you are not locking yourself in a technology anyways. Given how flexible and fast-moving technology is today one could probably also find a good argument that you absolutely should always base your projects on PHP.