I agree, PHP, is easy to learn, use and abuse and makes many people who don’t know anything about server and web development feel like experts, but that doesn’t mean PHP sucks, those developers suck.

Recently I read on SEOmoz:

There is no mileage in buying vBulletin for $160. It can’t be any good at that price – and is probably written in PHP. You are looking for a cool project to write in Ruby and here’s your chance.

Just in case the author doesn’t know, here is a list of sites that are powered by PHP:
1 – Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/index.php)
2 – Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index.php)
3 – Yahoo! bookmarks (You have to login)
4 – Stumbleupon (http://www.stumbleupon.com/index.php but redirects to http://www.stumbleupon.com/)
5 – SEOmoz itself! (http://www.seomoz.org/index.php)
6 – Flickr (http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/uploads/flickr_php.pdf Flickr even uses Smarty template engine!)
There are more but I think this is enough.

Now vBulletin which is also written in PHP, is a state of the art forum software that is running some of the biggest communities on the web such as:
1 – Digital Point
2 – Site Point
3 – RC Groups
etc. ect.

That’s all.