When someone asks "why?" to something, I almost always think "Why not?" Is there a good reason you shouldn't play with Ruby, Scala or Python on Android? If so, why not PHP?
$language is better depending on the circumstances. PHP is very good for building small websites, I'd say almost ideal in some ways. Whether or not it works well in other fields is debatable. (Note: large companies using it successfully is not a good measure of something working well.)
Additionally PHP is inherently slow not because of the interpreter but because of the design the language. Most websites aren't affected by this because many of the functions in the standard library are implemented in C and are very fast.
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When someone asks "why?" to something, I almost always think "Why not?" Is there a good reason you shouldn't play with Ruby, Scala or Python on Android? If so, why not PHP?
Because php isn't a general purpose language. It's a rather clunky hammer outside of the web.
Your answer sounds a lot like "Because $language is better" and there are no winners of holy wars.
Wake me up when you finish writing a payroll system in awk...
Wake me up when you finish writing one in any language.
There is a non-trivial chance I had already written one before you were born.
$language is better depending on the circumstances. PHP is very good for building small websites, I'd say almost ideal in some ways. Whether or not it works well in other fields is debatable. (Note: large companies using it successfully is not a good measure of something working well.)
Additionally PHP is inherently slow not because of the interpreter but because of the design the language. Most websites aren't affected by this because many of the functions in the standard library are implemented in C and are very fast.