I think this question assumes a premise that many of the people that use PHP would not agree with. For that reason, the responses you get may be biased. I am a

I think this question assumes a premise that many of the people that use PHP would not agree with. For that reason, the responses you get may be biased. I am a part time developer that uses PHP, and there are a number of reasons I haven't moved off it for back end work. The first is that although it seems to be the target of dislike from those working on the bleeding edge, it is as popular as it is for good reasons. It has flaws, sure, but it is loads better than it was a few years ago, and it will continue to improve. There are usually two ways that people change something. The first is being 'pushed' - something being so bad you seek out a replacement, the second being 'pulled' - seeing something so compelling in another product you have to switch. PHP isn't something that will push you away from it, I believe those switching are being pulled to other languages because of whatever nifty features they provide. In cases where you are working in established development environments on established projects, the switching costs are rarely justified for the marginal improvements. I use PHP because it does everything I want it to, and its what I know. Familiarity has a huge advantage and to sacrifice short term productivity for possible long term gain is something that is easy to put off. Another thing that I love about PHP is its ubiquity and how easy it is to get in to start writing with it. Fairly recently, I did seriously consider making the switch and giving two other languages a month each to see how they worked for me. What actually stopped me from doing this is that around the same time a lot of my work changed from server-side to client-side programming. My back end programming in my recent projects acts more like a simple interface between my client software and database than anything else, so I have been doing very little of it. I have a few questions in response, and I ask these as someone genuinely curious. How big do you think the gain is between working in PHP and working in <other language>? What do you think that other languages may be lacking that PHP doesn't that may make people not want to move?