[interwho]

Personally, I'd go with PHP.

Why?

- It's easy to get things done fast.

- There are plenty of classes available online that'll make things even easier.

- It's easier to maintain (IMHO) than some other languages.

- It'll run on almost all web hosting services cheaply.

- It's scaleable.

If and when you need something more powerful, a seamless transition can be made over to another language.

[john_wang_wjq]

I agree that PHP is good for "personal" development. But for large-scale system, PHP is far from a good option. By large-scale I mean there need many developers working on many modules interoperating with well-defined interfaces.

There are simply other languages which have all the goodness you mentioned of the "Personal Home Page"(PHP) language, as well as some more advangtages over PHP in a long term development procedure.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

As long as you use some tricks to hide the .php from your URLs, else you'll have to add tons of redirects.

But PHP is quite good. Especially PHP 5.4, which has lots of nice things like short array syntax.

[p_sherman]

Large webapp and seamless transition to another language are not really compatible.

[interwho]

If you use the same database, and just change the code accessing it, it is.