I'll give you the one good reason to use PHP: Everyone and their dog offers PHP hosting for pennies a month. It's just there. It's the Windows of programming la

I'll give you the one good reason to use PHP: Everyone and their dog offers PHP hosting for pennies a month. It's just there. It's the Windows of programming languages. You can distribute something like phpBB or MediaWiki and any doofus webmaster will have some understanding of how to install it and stuff the data into the shared MySQL database next door. So if that's your target audience, or if you're happy sitting around on Dreamhost setting up your site's shopping cart as quickly as reasonable and then doing better nontechnical things, fine. Use PHP. Pray you don't get hacked, but you'll probably be praying in any language at that scale. If you're out to sell technology or something, or handling real business (like, millions of dollars) with your website, there are probably better ways to build a long-lived robust technical solution, and most people here would appreciate it.