I think it's important to remember that each programming language is good at different things. You wouldn't ordinarily try and build your blog with C++ just as

I think it's important to remember that each programming language is good at different things. You wouldn't ordinarily try and build your blog with C++ just as you wouldn't ordinarily try and create a new operating system in JavaScript. I think PHP is certainly capable of building larger systems and in recent years things like Composer and frameworks like Laravel are putting a lot of the PHP ecosystem on par with what's available for most other languages. But I view PHP's sweet spot as small web sites. If you're a small business that needs to add a form or two, some simple DB access, send a couple emails (a few dozen to a few hundred lines of code) PHP is your ideal choice to get something up quickly, get it up on virtually any web host out there easily, and get back to focusing on your business. PHP's lack of elegance doesn't matter all that much when you're talking about a small project. I think that Ruby/Python/etc are much more elegant when you get to the point that you're building larger web apps, but PHP is a very practical choice for lots of simple projects.