Well that's the thing... most of the PHP popularity is for the sites that get installed on Dreamhost etc.
I've deployed C# apps; I did .NET exclusively for about 8 years. It's great! But telling Joe's Washer Warehouse that they have to pay for the .NET stack, and that they can't just find a random PHP guy to do any further development is kind of tough pill to swallow.
Yes, PHP sites are usually the lowest common denominator, but on the other hand there are lots of people that are only willing to pay for that. There's a reason the PHP market is as big as it is. Thankfully for those of us in PHP-land there are starting to be lots of quality frameworks like Drupal and Symfony so that it's not such a horrible experience as it used to be.
And the other part is really the market. You want a large CMS-driven website? PHP is where it's at. That's where the code and communities are. There's a reason that lots of very large websites use Drupal. Sure, if I was going to try and make some sort of big-backend web app that did a lot of services and whatever, I'd want to do .NET. But as a freelance web developer, those projects just aren't there. Like it or not, I'm in PHP land.
(And RoR used to be a total nightmare to deploy. That whole community needs to send a collective giant cardboard check to the mod_passenger guy.)
I've deployed C# apps; I did .NET exclusively for about 8 years. It's great! But telling Joe's Washer Warehouse that they have to pay for the .NET stack, and that they can't just find a random PHP guy to do any further development is kind of tough pill to swallow.
Yes, PHP sites are usually the lowest common denominator, but on the other hand there are lots of people that are only willing to pay for that. There's a reason the PHP market is as big as it is. Thankfully for those of us in PHP-land there are starting to be lots of quality frameworks like Drupal and Symfony so that it's not such a horrible experience as it used to be.
And the other part is really the market. You want a large CMS-driven website? PHP is where it's at. That's where the code and communities are. There's a reason that lots of very large websites use Drupal. Sure, if I was going to try and make some sort of big-backend web app that did a lot of services and whatever, I'd want to do .NET. But as a freelance web developer, those projects just aren't there. Like it or not, I'm in PHP land.
(And RoR used to be a total nightmare to deploy. That whole community needs to send a collective giant cardboard check to the mod_passenger guy.)