It's a great language for quick prototyping or doing sysadmin tasks (i would choose php over any shell script language any day). I also see no evidence that php

It's a great language for quick prototyping or doing sysadmin tasks (i would choose php over any shell script language any day). I also see no evidence that php apps in practice are any less reliable. Php is in fact probably more reliable because it doesn't give you dangerous stuff like multi-threading and because its very forgiving of errors (it doesn't consider an error a good reason to stop running code).