...and also, ugly as it may be as a language, PHP is a great tool at reducing complexity if you think higher-level (deployment, scaling): the shared-nothing, each requests runs from scratch (and in an isolated process) architecture makes lots of things 100x times simpler. Of course, this wonderfully simple architecture turns 100% against you if you have the bad taste of trying to write a big and "properly engineered" framework on top of it.

I kinda love PHP as long as I don't have to read/write any of it myself ;)

(Oh, and you made me realize what's the core of my "french software" stereotype: getting complex-vs-simple completely backwards! ...of course, it's just a funny stereotype, the real people I've actually known are all smart and cool and understand trade-offs even when we don't agree on architecture and organizing stuff :P)

Did I say anything about PHP?! I mentioned Symfony but that's contrary too the point (and a fine example of over-engineering, btw...).

And Ocaml seems cool, though Haskell people see it like "eager Haskell with too many features and complexity and syntax on top". I took a look at the Ocsigen Ocaml web framework long ago though, and I was like "jeeez, wtff"... the language may seem cool, but that thing... ugh... But I can't really have an opinion on that since the only truly functional languages I've really played with were dynamic (Clojure and Erlang), static + functional is not really my area of experience.