Productivity with PHP peaks near the time when you start your project (when it is great and beats out a lot of other technologies) and without a lot of work, go

Productivity with PHP peaks near the time when you start your project (when it is great and beats out a lot of other technologies) and without a lot of work, goes downhill from there. Put simply, it is not designed to scale well in terms of code size and complexity. It is very concrete and doesn't encourage any use of abstraction by default. For some types of apps & sites this is no problem and the simple and flat design of PHP will actually be of benefit. There are frameworks that alleviate some of these issues (Cake, etc.) but they are really compensating for the language deficiencies that cause the problem rather than solving them. Other languages give you a little more overhead, are a little more generic, but in return they give you far stronger tools to deal with the complexity burden that (inevitably) hits at some point for many projects.