Personally, I think you can be suboptimal in all sorts of ways which cost you, yet nevertheless succeed. Though one problem: people use a tiny percentage of su

Personally, I think you can be suboptimal in all sorts of ways which cost you, yet nevertheless succeed. Though one problem: people use a tiny percentage of successful companies to justify their mistakes. One ad company manager told me, "Well Doubleclick's UI was slow!" But the obvious retort, if I thought he'd listen: "You're not at Doubleclick, are you? No, your company's failing miserably. Same with PHP: "Don't imagine you're Facebook. You'd be lucky to be Myspace." If your tradeoff analysis suggests PHP is the right choice, so be it. But comparing oneself to Facebook suggests commitment to irrationality and monkey-see-monkey-do. It'd be more reasonable to evaluate PHP in terms of tool quality, but that's too much to ask for in the tech industry.