Probably because the haters never took the time to re-evaluate PHP.
I've written daemons, GUI programs (!) and even stuff like custom binary network protocols in PHP, in a fraction of the time it'd have needed in C/C++...
I've written daemons, GUI programs (!) and even stuff like custom binary network protocols in PHP, in a fraction of the time it'd have needed in C/C++...
Neither Java, Ruby, Python nor anything else are as simple to setup and resource-friendly to run as a PHP-FCGI+nginx setup.