[nobleach]

I certainly don't want to get into the "PHP is a fractal of bad design" vs "PHP is awesome because it runs on a very high percentage of websites, including Facebook" debate. (I have no dog in this race, and I have absolutely no opinion on PHP) But I would ask, are those multi-billion dollar businesses making that much money DUE to their usage of PHP? Or could they run on almost any language/framework and still do just as well? We've heard the stories like "Twitter dropped Rails and rewrote their message queue in Scala, and a lot of their backend in Java"... so I get that there are _some_ scaling stories regarding languages... I just don't think most success stories can be attributed to language choice. Now obviously if you build your entire business on something obscure, and cannot find any competent developers, that's an issue....

[7sigma]

That's why I said you "can". As someone who's done c, c++, JavaScript, lisp, prolog, a bit of python, whenever I see people saying such and such language is bad (like trikko's comment), it just strikes me as immature. There are way bigger factors that determine the success or failure of a project yet somehow I keep hearing developers fixated with the idea that the language alone will make or break the project.