You have kind of answered you own question: "people who just care about hacking something together and, as long as it works, it's fine." If you need to hack s

You have kind of answered you own question: "people who just care about hacking something together and, as long as it works, it's fine." If you need to hack something fast, deploy it using SCP on a cheap hosting then PHP is a very reasonable choice. The only thing which is needed is Apache PHP module enabled. No need to think about ports, starting some additional server, doing proxies, etc. Registration form? In PHP you just need to open a file, add <? tag, 5 lines and you call database, another 5 to send email with SMTP server and you are done. No need for application generators, templates engines, DB abstraction layers. Fancy functional programing language not needed, basic knowledge of some C-like language suffice to hack something fast. Obviously such application will have maintenance issues, etc. but very often this just does not matter.