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I wonder if it would have been better to have changed the name of PHP - maybe follow the fortran approach and tack on the year.

Can vs Should. While PHP is turing complete, there are much better toolkits for the jobs you described.

Sure, but PHP abstracts a load of stuff when you're doing cross-platform stuff - and what's more important, it allows you to keep one language (thus reusing codebase) when you're also doing stuff with web interfaces.

Neither Java, Ruby, Python nor anything else are as simple to setup and resource-friendly to run as a PHP-FCGI+nginx setup.

The guys behind MtGox were working on a PHP implementation of SSL, before it all went south there.