I started my life as a dev with PHP, learning it on the job to set up a custom Wordpress theme with plugins for special datatypes (eg STCs). When I was 21, the

I started my life as a dev with PHP, learning it on the job to set up a custom Wordpress theme with plugins for special datatypes (eg STCs). When I was 21, they offered to pay for my tuition so I went back for a CoE degree (later switching to CS). The moment I touched C++ - on my very first day in their “intro to programming” class - I fell in love. The type system, debugging, and ecosystem was fantastic compared to PHP 7 that I was using at the time. With my manager's permission, I went back to some of our existing intranet apps and built a C++-based API for them that our PHP would call over a web-socket, so that I could leverage the type system (and performance). Those systems are still in daily use, company wide. Maintenance hasn't been a problem. And that’s despite running in a really weird environment (IBM Pase for i). Now, after using Rust and Axum, I'd vastly prefer the Rust ecosystem for creating that type of API. But C++ deserves credit. It really is a great language, especially if you’re coming from web languages like (non-TS) JavaScript or PHP.