As you can see in most aspects, PHP scored first or second place. Given the wide variety of topics, there is no way PHP will ever score first place across the board, however, that is not a bad thing. While it's possible to do client side scripting with PHP, that's not the main focus of the core.

In the one area that the core developers have been focusing on for the past several years, performance, PHP scored first place. This is a testament to the hard work of a lot of very talented developers, worldwide.

What should the PHP community take away from this report, other than an overwhelming sense of pride? I see two things that we as a language need to work on.

• Exceptions.
  

  The most obvious is Exception handling. PHP placed 7th for this very important category and rightly so. PHP's Exception handling feels bolted on. Each release gets a bit better but until we can trap every error, warning or notice then PHP will never score high in this category.

  
  
• Memory Management
  

  Since this report was generated in the early part of 2009, I'm sure they tested the 5.2 branch and not the 5.3 branch. 5.3 did a lot for memory management including memory management for long running processes. Since this is a survey and not a benchmark, they can't 're-run' the survey with 5.3. However, I do expect the score to go up. That having been said, this is one of those areas that we have to constantly improve. We all appreciate the core developers attention to this over the past few years but hope that they won't rest on their laurels.

This is an opinion survey and does not pretend to be objective. That would explain why PHP, with the largest community of any of the languages other than JavaScript would still rank behind Ruby. The report admits that, with respect to Ruby, "despite the hype of Ruby during the last two or three years, its market penetration has been feeble and it is not easy to find Ruby developers". Even so, they go on to say "The Ruby community is quite small but very dedicated and very vocal". The Community score was not based on size or a metric that can be controlled; it was based on how vocal the community is. The Ruby developers, though small, are much more vocal passionate and zealous about their language than the PHP community was. Even so, it was close.

All in all, PHP developers can hold their head up high and know that they have made a good career choice. PHP is the most popular web scripting language. This translates into more opportunities for developers who spend the time to master it.