Yes I agree wholeheartedly. There are two very fair knocks against PHP: it's not the fastest, and the API uses somewhat inconsistent standards and conventions

Yes I agree wholeheartedly. There are two very fair knocks against PHP: it's not the fastest, and the API uses somewhat inconsistent standards and conventions (isset vs. is_array for instance...so frustrating). But for the slowness aspect, it's not so slow that you are really hindered by this unless you are doing something that requires very intense performance, in which case why are you using a higher level language anyway. Pretty much the rest of its bad reputation is undeserved, and the downsides are on the level of give and take you get with any other language.