This is a good summary of the common gripes. I would like to add to this list the history of things BREAKING even with minor version updates (although to be fai

This is a good summary of the common gripes. I would like to add to this list the history of things BREAKING even with minor version updates (although to be fair a lot of this has been due to radical changes in the object model over the past few years). I also think there's a fundamental problem with this question. I think one must make the comparison between web development frameworks, rather than saying PHP/Ruby/Python - you need to say Symfony (or PHP framework X - I just happen to like Symfony), Rails or Django (or Spring or Grails or whatever). In that case: the comparison is simple and personal. Go to the Symfony tutorial, go do the Django tutorial, go do the Rails tutorial. See which one clicks the best. I personally find PHP enjoyable to use because I've used it for a while and I'm used to it's idiosynchracies. I've used it for web development but I've also used it for command line daemon processes that have run, without fail, for the past 3 years. I've never had cause to benchmark those processes in terms of performance with any other language because I've never run into performance problems, but your mileage may vary. In short: I think PHP gets a lot of bad press - but PHP also gets a lot of things done.