That's probably because flashy websites distract you from the content. Most of the websites you listed are content heavy, and although some of them could use a facelift(ex:craigslist), their design doesn't overshadow the information that's displayed.

Please clarify on what aspects of the article you deemed ignorant?

Like thinking Intelissense is a language feature for instance, or trying to shoehorn an inherently web language into general purpose and complaining (it's doable, everybody does it but you have to accept it was not meant to).

Sorry if it came off that way, I'll reword that part of the article as it seems to be misinterpreted. I understand that intellisense is a feature of an IDE, and not the language. I use netbeans with PHP, and it does have auto-complete. What I meant was that the code format used in C# was easier to use(maybe I am just used to it) than PHP's style.

I initially wrote the app in C#ASP.NET(2.0) but had trouble getting it to work well on the server with mono(problems with GDI), so I switched to PHP and used it as a learning experience. Perhaps I should have used a more general purpose language, but at the time I was unaware of the limitations of PHP.

Thanks, I'll consider using Smarty. How about running background processes? What's the accepted way to implement them?

I don't think you can. PHP doesn't really run in a server like Java and .NET do. Zend does have a Server product (http://www.zend.com/en/products/server), I never tried it but it might offer background processes. I normally just use cron to trigger a url.

Or you can use cron to run a script written in PHP.

What's so bad about PHP? I’d assume the goal in web development is the end product or service and not the means to it. It seems easy to miss the forest for trees, and delve into cult-like arguments of whatever software stack is hip.

> I’d assume the goal in web development is the end product or service and not the means to it.

I don't think I agree. The end product's possibility to be exist at all depends on the mental health of your employees, how efficient they are, and what tools they use. Someone who is unmotivated due to using a language or a tool that is horrible will work only on work morale as a resource for motivation, and it's only a matter of time before that resource runs out, and they'll start feeling miserable and perform sub-optimally.

I don't have an opinion on PHP, although I've made a few cool things with it and enjoyed coding in it, so I don't think it's necessarily that bad.