&#62; <i>the best carpenter is the one who gets the job done with the tools at hand. go php. there are just bad programmers, not bad tools.</i><p>It really depends on your subjective view of what "best" means.<p>The best programmer in the world can probably do a better job than you at any given task, using only the GCC compiler.<p>But ... I'd bet he's going to cost you hundreds of dollars per hour, and he probably wouldn't get the job done faster that a decent programmer who is using "the right tool for the job".<p>Good design / Low cost / Fast ... pick 2<p>Myself ... I could use PHP, since it's mainstream and there are lots of low-cost hosting solutions, but I prefer Python because the tools are more mature and not necessarily related to web-dev (iPython, PyQT, Nltk, numpy, Django) ... and really, I've worked with Symfony, Django, ASP.NET MVC, Ruby on Rails and Perl's Catalyst ... the quality of a framework is heavily dependent on the language, trust me ;)