You say if you make one assumption about C, you have to say the same about PHP. Well, PHP is academic, C is not. C is fast, PHP is not. I would only have agreed with your post if it were PHP and C++. C++ is academic and it's not slow but it is slower.

You also say that you either like both PHP and C, or you like neither. Well what about Lua, Python... or any other embed-able language? Most Python programmers would say they don't like PHP but love C, because the languages work well together, same with PERL as well. You could say that you either like both C++ and PHP or you like none. Maybe, because PHP can compile to C++ to become extremely fast, which is why Facebook and Yahoo both use PHP because it can be fast and it is well documented. It should not be compared to C though.

(Note: I contradict myself, PHP by itself is slow. PHP is not fast whatsoever. C++ is a low level language which is the only reason why it's fast and I think it's awesome that PHP can compile to C++. I'm in no way against PHP and I'm not encouraging people to stray away from the language. I was just pointing a simple error in this post.)