[john_flintstone]

Not everyone who programs wants to be a competent programmer, or even a programmer at all. Some people just want to build a contact form for their website, or work out how to pull a list from a database and display it in the sidebar of the their blog.

PHP lets them do that without having to learn anything more complex. Why spend days or weeks learning something when you can work out how to do what you need to do in hours?

[LnxPrgr3]

If we're going to have amateurs doing things like this, we should at least give them the tools to do it safely without having to know too much, since they're not going to learn more than they have to in order to make something that looks good enough. PHP still requires you to know to avoid HTML/script injection and SQL injection vulnerabilities just to write a safe guestbook.