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PHP is a solid workhorse. Quick to prototype, and once a PHP app is up and running, it just works.

Wikipedia, Facebook, MailChimp, WordPress, tons more -- they all load fast and are hardly ever down.

You can argue all day about the fine details of programming languages, but PHP is popular for good reasons.

You attribute high availability to the infrastructure entirely, not just a front facing programming language. Facebook has a massive architecture and only it's front-end stuff (views, data retrieval) are done in PHP. Everything else are separate services written in Java (or some other JVM language) and communicate through Thrift. PHP isn't accredited with Facebook's high availability and Facebook doesn't even serve PHP, it serves compile C++ code that was compiled from PHP.

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