That's the thing - the choice isn't between languages, but between tools. For example, having a lot of libraries is not strictly a language feature, but it does

That's the thing - the choice isn't between languages, but between tools. For example, having a lot of libraries is not strictly a language feature, but it does effect choosing one over the other. I'm not going to be stupid enough to deny this, but my argument was that PHP as a language doesn't offer anything unique, so if they were to actually clean it up and break all compatibility there would no incentive to move to this "new" cleansed PHP platform as opposed to existing, better languages and platforms. You are pretty much in agreement with my original statement.