Analogy: "I'm so sick of people speaking English. It's a clumsy language, a mutt of all others, and there are better alternatives that are more elegant and easier to use. I wish we all could write poetry in a better language." Who cares? People speak English as do people write PHP. It's pretty easy to create a great platform with it, and explaining its inner-workings is cocktail fodder. Performance is acceptable, PECL is great, the documentation is par, and the community is vast. So, the problem here is basically a disdain for the positions of curly braces and underscores? There are too many regex functions? Your $, >, or ; keys are broken? Zend's ORM isn't Railsy enough? If you are fed up with it, then write more JavaScript. Everything behind the client is fast becoming glue for databases and filesystems anyway.