Is PHP more scalable than Ruby or Python?
mechanical_fish: Don't freak out about it. This is not like getting married.First the easy advice: If you have friends pulling you toward Ruby and Rails... learn Ruby and Rails. Momentum is a good thing. Comradeship is a good thing. Don't worry: If it turns out in two years that we'd all rather be using Python and/or Django, we can switch. It will still be there.Now we begin to edge toward personal opinion: I'd avoid sticking with PHP. Not merely because PHP is often like a parody of a programming language, but because variety is the spice of life. Learn something different. Take a look at how other languages do things.Now, if you really want to stay out of a language war, ignore anyone who goes on about the "scalability" of their chosen language. Most of those claims are just posturing, backed up with no relevant data. [1] If your PHP friends won't shut up about their language's unbeatable super speed, show them the first fifteen minutes or so of Yehuda Katz's Merbcamp keynote:http://www.merbcamp.com/video/katz3.mp4... and once they're done rending their garments and throwing things at the screen tell them to take some data and go argue with someone who cares. You've got better things to do.---[1] Why do most language scalability arguments have such dubious data to back them up? Because, as others have taken pains to point out, languages don't scale: application architectures scale. If your webapp is much more complex than "Hello, World" its efficiency will depends on a host of factors, of which the speed of any particular language construct is usually a tiny one.