&#62; everything is done with oddly-named functions that take positional arguments in an inconsistent order, return error codes instead of throwing exceptions, and randomly spew warning messages<p>These are all anti-features for programmers who already know how to program but they're quite helpful or moot when you're a complete noob. You're going to be spending at least a third of your time in the manual so guessable function names aren't as important as findable ones, you'll be doing lots of "what the?" style debugging so verbose warnings right on the page save you one fewer step in the debugging process.<p>Additionally it's easy to find a PHP hosting provider for peanuts, it will happily scale to moderate use without overmuch cleverness architecturally and there are literally thousands of noob-level tutorials that get you from "I want to build a website" to something that works rapidly. You don't feel the pain of the language until you're pretty far down the road but as Flickr and (obviously) Facebook have shown it's not too difficult to limit the pain and keep growing.