As a language for developing applications, PHP really isn't that bad. It has pretty damn good support for OOP (at least within recent releases). It lacks in c

As a language for developing applications, PHP really isn't that bad. It has pretty damn good support for OOP (at least within recent releases). It lacks in concurrency support and other random things like namespaces (for which swombat advised against large-sized sites). As a language for scaling... not too shabby. Many people who bash PHP for inability to scale really don't know jack shit about what they're talking about. Chances are, their app is slow because of all the O(n^2) loops... and they need to go take a class or two on algorithms, networking, and/or distributed systems. I used to work with PHP a lot... eventually moved to Python simply because it was more succinct. Our teams are extremely small, and we needed a more expressive language; needed to get more done in less time. The rest speaks for itself... We actually have moved from 100% PHP to: python for web apps, decent amount of Io & Ruby for utilities/monitoring and such, and working on a load balancer in Erlang... much more powerful development. And we really haven't run into many major stability problems...