[kaens]

To be frank, at this point in time when I'm developing for the web, just about the only thing I care about when it comes to what language I'm using is that it's not PHP.

I understand why people use PHP, but as someone who has a decent amount of experience with a variety of languages, I really want a language that's designed sanely, especially for things like web-(sites|apps). I'll gladly take a hit on the language-speed side, or on the ease-of-finding-hosting side for the sake of not having to put up with PHPs craziness.

Why? For just the reason you pointed out - the vast majority of websites don't get enough traffic to make the language matter. I'd imagine that things like learning how to configure apache and/or a caching tool like memcached would handle most of the performance bottleneck on a site that did get that level of traffic.

Seriously - if a language is "fast" enough to allow the creation of responsive GUI apps, it's "fast" enough for web-apps.

[neovive]

PHP might not be the most elegant in the world, but for a small- to mid-size web application, using a solid PHP5 framework (like KohanaPHP) along with a PHP accelerator and you have an easy-to-use and easy-to-deploy application.

[kaens]

I agree in general, it's just not for me.

For small to mid-size web apps, I far prefer python and cherrypy (http://www.cherrypy.org). Easier to use, and easier to deploy assuming you have hosting that gives you control over your hosted machine (here's looking at you, slicehost).