>PHP even uses more memory than Java on some benchmarks, which is pretty damn impressive. True, but in a web scenario, once a PHP script finished running it's

>PHP even uses more memory than Java on some benchmarks, which is pretty damn impressive. True, but in a web scenario, once a PHP script finished running it's completely removed from memory - so PHP usually ends up using less memory than other languages, since memory leaks don't get a chance to do that much damage. As for verbosity, PHP5's object model makes it possible to write PHP that's almost as verbose as Java (eg the code in this article) but you don't have to. You can write PHP that's comparable to Ruby & Python in size (if not in elegance).