[fatbird]

It would be interesting to see a ranking of programming languages by the rate at which they accrue ill-will with continued use :)

It's a very good point: the more widespread a language, the larger the proportion of users will be beginners, who will almost certainly confuse their own inexperience with language-driven frustration (again, c.f. JavaScript). My pet theory on the broad appeal of PHP is that it coincided with the easy availability of shared hosting accounts where PHP was the default scripting environment available. The barrier to entry for blogs, shopping carts, forums, everything was incredibly low, leading to an explosion of software, tutorials, walkthroughs, and community that was heavily slanted towards beginners, dilettants and "low end" programmers". I made a living as one for several years, doing PHP for $5-10k jobs, and there was endless small-business work in this segment.

If modpython had worked as well as modphp, the world might look very different today.