"I often hear 'more practical', but rarely 'better'" Why "more practical"? There are a slew of other languages and frameworks out there that could be used. P

"I often hear 'more practical', but rarely 'better'" Why "more practical"? There are a slew of other languages and frameworks out there that could be used. PHP gives you the flexibility to create more complex projects without being pigeon-holed into one specific framework. I noticed this with some of the newer languages (and frameworks) such as RoR and Django. The higher the level you go, the more difficult it is to get around the built-in features that try to make it easier to develop an application. PHP is at the perfect level for me. Higher than say c, but lower than something like RoR. Also, the c syntax makes it to move onto other languages. It's also been around for 15 years, which means a plethora of support and examples. The language itself may have some issues (naming convention, Unicode support, non-standard namespace convention), but it can still be used to create solid applications that scale well (if you know what you are doing). Since PHP has been around longer, people really need to come up with reasons NOT to use it (and why I should be using new language X). So far, I'm not convinced.