[mVChr]

I'm preferentially a Python programmer who is currently working on a large well-known high-Alexa-ranked website that uses the LAMP stack. The site has been around for a while and is a behemoth, so I understand why it has stayed with these technologies despite the fact that there are many people on the project at this point who'd prefer otherwise. There are both ugly workarounds and rambling boilerplate in several places due to limitations in both PHP and MySQL, and there are also other ugly portions of the codebase due to inexperienced developers or bad legacy decisions that haven't been fully refactored (not the fault of PHP or MySQL). However, there is also a good deal of work that is well thought out and architected so I no longer have as many qualms about PHP as I used to (that I now realize was due to being thrown into codebases that were just a mishmash of crap... there do seem to be more of those in PHP than in other languages, but that's just my personal exposure).

All the same, if you're not inheriting a legacy codebase, I don't think there is any reason to use a LAMP stack on a greenfield project that you will be creating tomorrow. There are just too many better alternatives out there.