[OstiaAntica]

That's exactly right. I learned to code from a PHP book a decade ago, and now I am using the excellent OOP Symfony2 PHP Framework. The full spectrum of options are already available with PHP, the language and its frameworks lack nothing.

[gnaritas]

> the language and its frameworks lack nothing.

It lacks a coherent design philosophy; it's a collection of hacks; a house of cards with no style. It's full of idiosyncrasies that must be memorized because they make no logical sense. Put simply, it completely lacks taste.

[ErrantX]

But it does the job :)

Which at the end of the day is the most common benchmark of utility.

[charliesome]

Everything does the job, it just depends how quickly and easily you can get that job done.

[pseudonym]

Right, and under the category of easily: What languages do you already know, What languages are you already actually comfortable using for a large scale project, and What is the production server running.

If the answer to all of the above is PHP, then you're going to get projects done faster there than you would in Python or Ruby.