I have a dislike for PHP for many reasons, but, we still develop software using it because it is almost universally installed. I cannot say the same for mod_perl (my current choice) or mod_python (my up and coming choice)
Zend has dutifully ignored an issue regarding security that would have removed SQL injections from being possible. Remember the Paris Hilton Phone hack fiasco? They have announced support for bind variables with the new 4.1 mysqli interface, but, to have avoided an issue for so long, and provided software with so many different configs that you cannot safely write code to handle security issues on every possible config, I think they really missed the point.
Followed by their fantastic answer to multi-threaded programming by issuing an exclusive lock before and after a task is running rather than doing a lock at only the times when the code isn't threadsafe, its an abomination.
php5 adds OOP as an afterthought. Its was the 'in' thing two years ago, lets shoehorn it in.
But, no other embedded language has made it into as many machines as php, few languages enjoy the glut of code available. And, given that it is somewhat universal, it is what it is.
Personally, its my last choice for development unless there is a good reason. Finding guys that know mod_perl (or even perl) or worse, python, is extremely difficult. Add on top of that templating engines and you have limited your employee pool substantially.
That being said, we did write almost 100k lines of php in the last 4 months for one project.
