While you certainly make good points from a business perspective, it's becoming increasingly more likely that programmers you can hire that both: + know PHP +

While you certainly make good points from a business perspective, it's becoming increasingly more likely that programmers you can hire that both: + know PHP + are experienced enough to deliver a working, maintainable application are also fluent in at least one of ruby or python, both of which are much nicer languages in general and have strong web-dev presences. The issue with hiring "people who know PHP" just because a whole lot of people know PHP is that issues with maintainability of whatever gets written tend to be much more of a pain than with similar projects in other high-level languages. It's not, of course, that you can't write a ball of unmaintainable mud in any language -- you certainly can. PHP is lacking in areas that make fixing that less of a nightmare, and lacking in areas -- both in the language, and in the community for lack of a better term -- that make writing maintainable stuff in the first place easier. The devs who know how to create maintainable PHP codebases, or fix unmaintainable ones tend to have experience with other languages. This should be, in my opinion, a pretty major concern for business. While it may not be apparent at first, there tends to be diminishing returns from maintenance and development of a product if it's a giant mess. Doing PHP on new projects for ease-of-hire is inviting that mess, due to a whole bunch of little things that tend to snowball. Skilled people won't want to work for you, people that will be skilled but lack experience will leave your employ, and eventually the project will grind to an iceberg pace and stress levels will get high for everyone. A good dev will probably not have a problem picking up whatever language, as long as you're using "general-use" languages. In the web-dev world, this is currently mostly ruby and python. Choose haskell, and you'll probably have some (read great) difficulty finding people to hire. Choose ruby or python and you'll be more likely to attract the type of devs you want, and at the worst you'll get someone inexperienced who makes a mess that is easier to fix than it would be in a PHP codebase of similar messiness. If it was just the merits of the language, I don't think I'd have much of a leg to stand on talking from a business end. It's not though, it's a whole lot of little negative things that can make a long-term project more likely to be a failure. The language, and the tools, and the community are getting better, but that's mostly due to the efforts of people who are skilled and experienced with a variety of things improving it because it's paying their bills. It's still far, far away from any other "popular" language in terms of tools, community, available libraries, and just about any other measurement you can make other than "number of people that can say they know it on a resume"