[RyanMcGreal]

I personally despise coding in PHP as much as anyone, but it has been used for a number of hugely successful projects, including Wikipedia and Facebook (that latter has even written a transpiler that converts PHP into C++). PHP is the bog standard on a LAMP stack so you know it will run on any environment, and there is a huge pool of programmers who know how to code it. Those are nontrivial reasons.

[Rapzid]

The P in LAMP stands for PHP, so it's the ONLY application language on a LAMP stack. Hope I'm not being too pedantic.

Symfony 2 is quality engineering. It's quite nice just to browse the source.

[sea6ear]

Times in the past that I've seen LAMP explained, I've read that the the P in LAMP was for PHP, Perl, or Python (any one of the 3).

[frowaway001]

If you consider Wikipedia a good example of what PHP can do, we have irreconcilably different quality standards.

I think the technical debt of PHP is a huge reason why development of the software behind Wikipedia hasn't fixed any of the huge issues in the last 5 years.

[RyanMcGreal]

I cite Wikipedia as an example of a successful website built with PHP, not necessarily as an example of a well-designed site.

You don't need to convince me that PHP is a clunky, unpleasant language. My point is that there are still legitimate reasons to choose it.

[hobarrera]

The fact that there are successful website implemente in PHP is not a legitimate reason to choose it.