"While there are enough programmers that know PHP (which is clearly a plus) there’s just not enough sex going on here. As with Perl, PHP really wasn’t in the loop."

How is that a valid argument? "not enough sex going on here" ... if you choose a language because it's sexy and not because of its utility, you are making a poor business decision.

Digg spent a long time revamping their system in new languages and on new databases and look how that turned out (not that the languages were the core part of their failure, but still)