PHP is the successor to PHP/FI, created in 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf to track visits to his online resume. This was a simple set of CGI (Common Gateway Interface) binaries written in C. In 1995 Rasmus released it to the public as an open-source technology and encouraged users to improve it. This lead to the rise of PHP 3 in 1997, and the la nguage began to gain popularity quickly.
I developed a liking for PHP when I was in college because I thought it was easy to learn, and there were many jobs available.
In conclusion, PHP is very much alive and, in my opinion, one of the easiest programming languages to learn.