>>Dismissing PHP is a big mistake.

My intention was the opposite: PHP became a dominant player despite having few of the threading/compiling features typically used to justify some Microsoft technologies. Clearly the lack has not held people back.

Another difference is that if PHP deficiencies do become apparent, it doesn't get abandoned and replaced by something far more complicated: instead the open source community comes up with cached opcodes, compilers and various methods to provide incremental improvements. Certainly this is great news for customers and developers whose existing investments are not devalued overnight.

FWIW, Facebook says it took "a small team" 2 years to write HipHop that converts PHP to C++ extensions that run at high speed, allowing Facebook's existing PHP investment to be leveraged. This shows what a motivated corporate can do if it feels like it. Those who have become accustomed to constant changes of direction and abandonments might like to think about that.