I submit that PHP's popularity has much more to do with mod_php and its ubiquity across cheap web hosts than any intrinsic merits as a language.
As someone who made a good living for many years by building stuff with PHP... I couldn't get away from it fast enough. Rails+Heroku is the new PHP, if you want a batteries-included web framework and easy hosting.
Not rhetorical: does anyone here use PHP for starting new projects?
Yes, in fact all of my new projects are in PHP unless I'm absolutely forced to use something else (and I say this as someone with years of Java experience and some Ruby experience).
As someone who made a good living for many years by building stuff with PHP... I couldn't get away from it fast enough. Rails+Heroku is the new PHP, if you want a batteries-included web framework and easy hosting.
Not rhetorical: does anyone here use PHP for starting new projects?