As someone who's dabbled in PHP for various ancient frameworks such as Mediawiki and Wordpress, I'm unsure why people knock on 'php' itself. The frameworks I just referenced may not be that great, and may require a lot of work to make it acceptable. But outside of that, there's a huge amount of development theory in the frameworks used to actually build your own websites, such as Symfony. I mean, take a look at the quick guide <a href="http://symfony.com/doc/current/quick_tour/the_big_picture.html" rel="nofollow">http://symfony.com/doc/current/quick_tour/the_big_picture.ht...</a><p>Or any other pieces of documentation. Its very well made, and demonstrates proper creation of websites using seperation of logics and configurations. And, you don't have to use symfony, there's tons of others that impliment the same kind of theories, which is why i think PHP has stuck around for so long and is improving like every other language. It has the ability to be formed into these seperations and logics. Much like how C# is able to give you a much better separation of data and objects than say C++. Perhaps thats something that could be done in any per-request response language like PHP, but it has withstood its test of time when properly done.