"And in the end, it's still PHP, which is duly disliked." You might dislike it, but that doesn't mean it's disliked. PHP has a giant base of programmers, scale

"And in the end, it's still PHP, which is duly disliked." You might dislike it, but that doesn't mean it's disliked. PHP has a giant base of programmers, scales, is easy to learn, is extremely versatile and powerful, and as you point out, the code was already in PHP. Only an idiot would rewrite a giant working codebase simply to have it in a language that's "difficult to hire and train" in. Or any language for that matter. Perhaps they could have pulled a netscape but instead decided to serve billions.