PHP gets a lot of bad press (some deserved, some not) -- but you can't fault the language. When PHP was first released, it was a major advancement over PERL an

PHP gets a lot of bad press (some deserved, some not) -- but you can't fault the language. When PHP was first released, it was a major advancement over PERL and SSI which prevailed at the time. With the growing adoption of PHP5 and the upcoming release of PHP6, PHP should be back on par (or at least close to) many of its 'high-class' peers. The slow migration to PHP5 by web hosts has definitely been a major bottleneck for the language. It's too bad that the extreme popularity of many PHP4-based apps is what prevented hosts from upgrading, thus giving developers little incentive to upgrade. The good news is that the popularity of Rails and MVC has inspired a broad selection of excellent MVC frameworks for PHP5 (ZendFramework, KohanaPHP) and with PHP6 on the way and new web hosting architectures on the rise, there may very well be a resurgence in PHP.