This is not another "PHP Sucks" article

PHP the language does suck. PHP's library sucks. PHP's overall environment though rocks and no one has even tried to ship a similar environment using a better designed language and library.

With PHP, one server can serve hundreds of websites only requiring a one time setup by an ISP. Those websites don't need to be aware of each other, don't need to worry about stepping on each other's toes. They run without extra tools or dev environments. No compilers, etc..

Compare to say python. For a python based server you need one server per website (virtual or otherwise). Even if you managed to use virtual servers you'd overload the physical server much earlier than with PHP. Same with node.js. node for 1 site beats PHP. Node for N sites on the same server loses to PHP. You can use CGI and use perl, ruby or python but then you'll kill your server as it has to spawn a process to run a page.

I've longed for a PHP like environment but with a better language and library. One that cheap ISPs can install and forget like they do with LAMP. AFAIK it doesn't exist.