>Can you give some examples of those certain types of problems? Wikipedia, Flickr, Facebook, Wordpress... ;) Seriously though - in the real world, language st

>Can you give some examples of those certain types of problems? Wikipedia, Flickr, Facebook, Wordpress... ;) Seriously though - in the real world, language strengths and weaknesses are very different from CS theory or discussion such as this one. PHP's popularity in itself has serious benefits: - You can pretty much install PHP anywhere because no host can afford not to support it well. - It will usually scale pretty decently and work reasonably well with your DB, OS and web server out of the box, because it has enough users that it got tested in many edge case installations. - Finding code is easy, and usually a new API provider will have a PHP library soon enough, if they want to get their API widely used. - Last but certainly not least - it's easier to find competent PHP coders than almost any language. There are a lot of incompetent ones and, as in any language, few excellent ones, but there's a larger base of competent-enough coders than Python or Ruby (or Lisp ;)) In my opinion most criticism of PHP misses the point. No question PHP is not an elegant language. By the same token, you could say Esperanto is far more clean than English, French more elegant and Italian more beautiful. But in the end, English is the one that's used.