Completely agreed that getting it out the door is the real core problem. However, there seems to be a meme that PHP is somehow a panacea for getting things out

Completely agreed that getting it out the door is the real core problem. However, there seems to be a meme that PHP is somehow a panacea for getting things out the door, as if suddenly upon picking up the PHP shovel, the programmer realizes how much time he was wasting having a real equality operator, and bangs out a solution in no time. I've seen the exact opposite: at least three PHP projects that got snowed under by "attempting to write something mindblowing", and zero Python projects that had the problem. I think that the truth behind the meme is that there is a certain level of intermediate programmer who has learned that doing things right saves time in the end, but hasn't yet internalized YAGNI and KISS. So this programmer discards PHP and picks up another language and is all excited about this new world of doing things robustly! "I'm going to write the best UUID generator. I'm going to unit test every line of the admin console. I'm going to make an ORM that batches queries in the most efficient way." And because these things weren't necessary, and the programmer is still intermediate, they can't get those things done and get the actual application done in anything approaching reasonable time. If the programmer is forced to use PHP, basically the same thing happens; just with object inheritance, and curl_multi, and novel configuration file formats, and so on. It's a cliff of enlightenment, and if you fall off it too hard, you might reject the enlightenment itself. Ignorance is bliss!