What in the world does language in which the site was made in has to do with success? They were never acquired for technology - in fact, go read about their setup on HA, it's very standard stuff.
If you build a product that gets traction and solid user base with some viral aspect in step 2, you will sell - even if your app/site were made in QBasic.
This kind of careless, selfish attitude really pisses me off. If I walked into a doctor's office for an operation, saw a tray full of old rusty instruments, was told by the doctor that they were "good enough" and that I should just worry about the result then I would not only walk out of that office but also file a complaint with the hospital.
If you're selling your services as a professional to clients you owe them the best work you can do. There are legitimate reasons to prefer Python or Ruby or Scala or whatever but if you're just too damn lazy to stop using PHP then you're essentially guilty of professional malpractice.
Are you serious? PHP is not "tray full of old rusty instruments". Please give me one concrete example what is wrong with a blog running on PHP. Or a small store? How is the END result differ between say Magento or something running on Django? Could you tell the difference? No, you could not. And while the PHP version would have been up and ready, you would still try to figure out how to properly run WSGI server in shared hosting.
> Please give me one concrete example what is wrong with a blog running on PHP. Or a small store? How is the END result differ between say Magento or something running on Django? Could you tell the difference? No, you could not.
Should languages be required to ensure the security of the code produced for them?
IMHO this is more of a complaint about the security of Wordpress, not the PHP core. People love to bring up phpBB or Wordpress in these discussions, but there are many, many more systems using large-scale PHP about whose security you just don't hear, because they are coded by professionals who know how to produce secure code in PHP.
Someone's being a little too serious for his own good. Every language has its quirks, pick your poison. In the end, the idea that is realized is what matters.
Also... how did you draw a relationship of PHP's quirks to rusty old instruments? Is C++ pretty much dust then?
If you build a product that gets traction and solid user base with some viral aspect in step 2, you will sell - even if your app/site were made in QBasic.