Advantages of PHP

I hate when people criticize anything PHP has in difference with other languages like C# or Java, first critics being Dynamic Typing and its Procedural part. Each programmer respects Old C and Shell Scripting. What I think is that PHP addresses problems they still have, and those PHP solutions still attracts people.

I will name what I (probably only I) think makes PHP appealing:

• It's specifically designed for solving web problems.
  
• It's free and easy to find a hosting with it.
• You don't need to compile code and it runs very fast.
• I don't need to cast a string if I want to use it as bool, int, float, or long.
• String, StringBuffer, StringBuilder, ... , WTF ?!
  
• PHP itself does not consume a lot of resources from servers.
• PHP.net is the best help I have seen for a language.
  
• Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, PHPBB, ... , OpenX, CodeIgniter, CakePHP, etc.
• Yahoo! uses it a lot (well, after 2009-11-10, maybe not).
• I admit it: PHP is a grandchild of C/C++ and Perl. He looks like them. You could learn something...
  

Another uncommon things of PHP:

• Its structure and lexic is a mix of C++, Perl and Java (PHP5).
• It THE best template to use with C/C++ on the web.
  
• PHP is providing OOP for things that are really necessary, Not for everything.
• If you organize your includes, you can take advantage of autocompletion.
• The famous Template Pattern is procedural in essence, and so PHP.
• It can access libraries like COM, .NET and ODBC connections, ...

Any other more profound things, please talk to Rasmus Lerdorf. He can surely make you speechless, or even. Also, I'd like to see objections about 1100 request per second Mr. Lerdorf showed in Getting Rich With PHP 5

LAMP it's free and rules! Although I'm worried about the M...