"""That's turned out so well for Facebook that all they kept of PHP was the syntax (too much of it to get rid of it, and esay to find people that know it) and t

"""That's turned out so well for Facebook that all they kept of PHP was the syntax (too much of it to get rid of it, and esay to find people that know it) and threw away the rest.""" For one, PHP (any language actually) is it's syntax and libs. So, that they "threw away the rest" is not an argument against PHP. People also run Rails on different rubies (JRuby/Rubinious/Ruby EE etc), so what? And they "threw" those for performance reasons, not for some better, purer language. If they had enough problems with PHPs performance to write a C++ compiler for it, you think they would have faired better if they started with something like Rails? Second, yeah, with multi billions revenue and nearly a bln users, yeah, I'd say it turned out pretty well for them. Proves that you can get pro --it doesn't get any more pro than FB in the web business-- without using expensive tools or the language du jour. """And the other 40% of the web ... well, it's cheap and has low barriers to entry. That does not mean it's great.""" There are Drupal/Wordpress sites that are among the best of the world... I don't know what you mean by "cheap" in this context. Is whitehouse.gov cheap?