Ooo, this is total flame war bait.....You're making a lot of assumptions about what a "modern" language is here, but I wont' dwell on that : ) Suffice it to say you should give PHP another look, particularly in the context of some of the PHP frameworks that are popular these days (e.g. CodeIgniter, Zend, CakePHP, etc.)

I develop in Java for my full-time job and develop in PHP for my side projects. I enjoy PHP much more than Java. It's a tool, and as with every tool you need to understand how to use it effectively. Some people don't have the mindset that makes this possible, but for those that are willing to let their instincts take over (as opposed to the compiler) can find PHP to be very productive. That being said, I can't for the life of me understand how something as big as Facebook can be done in PHP, but I'm willing to assume those guys are smarter than I am.

Ack, I am sorry if this came off as flamebait in any way at all.

My point was just that I've fallen into the common trap of focusing on languages that are currently in the limelight; and maybe it's time to think about putting PHP back in to my toolbelt.

Yes, I think that's fair and appropriate. PHP isn't necessarily sexy to many developers for a number of reasons (not a small part of it is the echo chamber effect), but it can be rewarding, productive, and performant. If nothing else, you'll have something else to put on your resume.

The language a website is written in is insignificant to its success. Outside of AND and OR, it's all syntax anyway.

Agreed for the most part. It drives me crazy when people make absurd comments like "PHP doesn't scale". Besides the fact that there are plenty of examples of PHP sites that have scaled, it exposes a basic ignorance of modern software development. That being said, I wouldn't want to sit down and try to do all my development in Pascal because it also has AND and OR, but I think we all get the point.