php. for reals.

From Taking PHP Seriously:

Most programmers who have only casually used PHP know two things about it: that it is a bad language, which they would never use if given the choice; and that some of the most extraordinarily successful projects in history use it. This is not quite a contradiction, but it should make us curious. Did Facebook, Wikipedia, Wordpress, Etsy, Baidu, Box, and more recently Slack all succeed in spite of using PHP? Would they all have been better off expressing their application in Ruby? Erlang? Haskell?

I think it's a great defense of the platform. I think so many developers underestimate things because they don't feel "engineer-y" enough. Bespoke complexity that grows up because the tools were too simplistic for the task at hand is not always that much worse than the complexity of opaque systems that are hard to debug. Transparency (in this case, the ease of following codepath execution), accesibility/ease of setup, tight code-run loops, having a ton of baked-in utility functions without pursuing versioning hell... these are great things.