In their recently released report "Users' Choice: Scripting Language Ratings", Evans Data Corporation (no relation to the author of this article) gave PHP the highest overall ranking of the languages they included in their survey.
The full EDC report can be
downloaded here (requires free registration).
Talking with 500 developers who actively use scripting languages, EDC ranked the languages on the following criteria. For each category, we've listed how PHP fared:
| Item | PHP's ranking |
|---|
| Ease of Use | 2nd |
| Exception handling | 7th |
| Extensibility | 2nd |
| Maintainability / Readability | 2nd |
| Cross-platform portability | 1st |
| Community | 2nd |
| Availability of tools | 1st |
| Quality of tools | 1st |
| Performance | 1st |
| Memory management | 4th |
| Client side scripting | 9th |
| Security | 2nd |