Being a very versatile web developper, I never understood why (good) PHP programming gets so little credit in the profession, whereas to me it appears to be much more demanding to write a decent piece of software using PHP rather than with Ruby, Python, or even ASP/.NET. These other languages have so many easy tools, great debugging and all that, with the natural counterpart of offering less performance. PHP strikes me more as the C Language of web development : easy to learn, but harder to decently apply on a day-to-day basis. So I wonder if the companies out there just value other languages more because they tend to misinterpret the "simplicity" of a language for the quality of the developer using it. To me, making a good website using Rails is child's play compared to making one using PHP, framework or not...