I don't think that's the insane part. When I think of 'insanity' and 'PHP' together what usually comes to mind is: ambiguous semantics for common operations, du

I don't think that's the insane part. When I think of 'insanity' and 'PHP' together what usually comes to mind is: ambiguous semantics for common operations, dubious security practices, irritating syntax, inscrutable runtime. There are some nice ideas in there, though. I dislike PHP-the-language as much as the next guy but sometimes you just need a three page website that you can hand off to a junior developer or web designer. If there is a language that does this, without being PHP, that would be awesome, but I don't think there is so I completely understand why somebody would just write three .php files rather than... install ruby, passenger, configure nginx, some supervisor script, etc. etc. I think that Google Apps for Business + GAE services complement PHP nicely--now you can use that shell scripting core to tie together your data with some powerful APIs and basically have no operational worries. We'll see what they do with it. Maybe the next Facebook will start out as a three page website on AppEngine.