Oh come on, does everybody here have to bash .Net? You do get an enormous performance boost from actually using a compiled language. The libraries are vast, and CLR lets you access other languages; and C# 3.0, with closures and linq and type inference, has become significantly more concise and elegant than Java.

And DAL's do matter for big apps. Ironically I advocate NHibernate as the ORM basis for a DAL, which is a port of a Java technology, so that doesn't make me much of a .Net-ist. And, sure, Doctrine ORM is coming for PHP.

I can understand mocking .Net in favor of the Java EE stack, or Python, or Ruby with RoR. But PHP? Really? PHP has a community supporting it - but is it really a language any of us would deliberately choose to write in, if not for its market share and ease of use for tiny starter projects?

A limited interpreted language that's unfriendly to serious architectural patterns, but that's just got so much market share because it's supported by a lot of infrastructure and because newbies can build toy projects in it easily - doesn't that sound like a typical anti-VB 6.0 rant from a few years back? It's just that now Microsoft happens to be on the other side of the argument.