PHP is actually a good templating language and a passable rapid-prototyping language. The fact is that it's more important to stay agile when you're growing exponentially then to pick some optimal technology.
PHP's simplicity makes it one of the best choices to be able to incrementally build a robust and scalable back-end underneath it as you go. ColdFusion and .NET I imagine to be some of the worst (though I have no experience with either, so maybe I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about).
Sorry but I cannot resist. Don't comment on things you know nothing about.
Ever heard of JBOSS? Did you know they have an open source CFML project called Railo? Or that Chris Schalk, developer advocate, from Google called what another open source cfml distro called Open Blue Dragon was doing on the GAE as "awesome". He said it was the easiest way to get running on the GAE.
The best developers can do amazing things in a number of different languages.
PHP is actually a good templating language and a passable rapid-prototyping language. The fact is that it's more important to stay agile when you're growing exponentially then to pick some optimal technology.
PHP's simplicity makes it one of the best choices to be able to incrementally build a robust and scalable back-end underneath it as you go. ColdFusion and .NET I imagine to be some of the worst (though I have no experience with either, so maybe I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about).