This debate reminds me a lot about another debate about language. When I studied English in college, I occasionally came across papers enumerating the weaknesses of the English language. It's terrible for writing poetry, because you can't rhyme like you can with Italian or seduce like you can with French. It's difficult to learn, because of irregularities in spelling and pronunciation.
Now that I'm a PHP developer, the response I give when people ask me why I use PHP and not a "real language" is the same one I would give if someone asked me why I speak English. There are more people who speak my language. If I travel to a remote fishing village in China, chances are I can find one person who speaks English. Try to find someone who speaks Italian. When I'm working on a web project, I know that if I write it in PHP I can find hundreds of developers to hire at a reasonable price versus hunting around for Ruby developers (who cost double).
At my day job, we run 200 websites, and 194 of them are written in PHP (1 is Java, 2 are .NET, 1 Ruby, 2 Coldfusion). When the company buys sites, the first step is converting them to PHP (if they aren't already), just so future maintenance is easy and cheap.
Now that I'm a PHP developer, the response I give when people ask me why I use PHP and not a "real language" is the same one I would give if someone asked me why I speak English. There are more people who speak my language. If I travel to a remote fishing village in China, chances are I can find one person who speaks English. Try to find someone who speaks Italian. When I'm working on a web project, I know that if I write it in PHP I can find hundreds of developers to hire at a reasonable price versus hunting around for Ruby developers (who cost double).
At my day job, we run 200 websites, and 194 of them are written in PHP (1 is Java, 2 are .NET, 1 Ruby, 2 Coldfusion). When the company buys sites, the first step is converting them to PHP (if they aren't already), just so future maintenance is easy and cheap.