> But the argument in your previous post, I read it as: "PHP is used by more of the popular sites because PHP is used by more sites in general" Which is kinda c

> But the argument in your previous post, I read it as: "PHP is used by more of the popular sites because PHP is used by more sites in general" Which is kinda circular, mostly repeating "PHP is popular". You misread what I wrote in that case. I said "There are also more websites with their foundations in PHP, so it's reasonable to expect a higher number of successes." This isn't circular reasoning, and let me show you why: Lets pretend I'm superhuman and create 10,100 unique, high quality websites in one day. Let's assume also that my skill and experience remains constant throughout building these 10,100 websites; I'll get no better at marketing, design, etc and all my decisions are of equal quality. The only difference is the programming language I use to develop some of the sites. For the sake of this example, let's assume that 1% of websites created, on average, end up with one million page views per month after six months. In this fictitious example, let's say that for grins I build 100 sites in Lisp and 10,000 sites in Perl. 1% of my Lisp sites will be successful (a grand total of one successful site) and 1% of my Perl sites will be successful (100). From this data you're erroneously concluding that Perl is more likely to result in a successful site. This is wrong, because the number of sites created in each language varies wildly, but the odds of hitting "traffic gold" are still 1% with everything else being equal. The language, therefore, doesn't impact success rate. Seeing something built in PHP doesn't make it a good choice, just a common one, just like smoking in the 1970s was a common choice, just not a good one. Facebook, while it's mostly written in PHP, is actually transcompiled to C++ (HipHop compiler) because PHP was insufficient. They're not actually running any PHP code in production. Also I keep hearing that their codebase is an unholy mess and that the only reason it hasn't been re-written in another language is that the codebase is just now too big to rewrite. Zuckerberg wrote Facebook in PHP because it was the language he knew, not because it was the best tool for the job. Marketing and user experience made the site successful, not the language. Don't just look at PHP and say "huh, it's common!" and conclude it's good. It just doesn't make sense and it's a logical error to do so.