[knieveltech]

"there are so many better choices"

This is absolutely true, assuming you're working on a blue-sky project or some niche purpose-built app. For the rest of the web, other available languages are (currently) missing one or more of the following:

- A wide selection of CMS's to choose from

- A wide selection of CRM's to choose from

- A wide selection of development frameworks to choose from

- commodity hosting environments ready to roll with little or no server configuration required

Declaring the choice of PHP over some other back-end language negligent in all cases is misguided.