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If you're going to disagree with me (and of course you're more than welcome to), please elaborate on your position. Simply stating that I'm wrong contributes nothing to the discussion.

Plus I'd like to hear differing opinions, especially since PHP tends to bring such heated debates.

To put it less shortly, I will have to write my own article.

But I always wanted to do one.

"Solving the web problem" means nothing unless we can define what the problem is. If the problem is to quickly push out a dynamic page, then PHP is good, at least as good as ASP or JSP in their PHP-ish mode.

Its adoption rate also shows it's a good solution to the "push dynamic pages out" problem, but there are at least two angles to this problem: the point of view of the programmer and the point of view of the server manager. I suspect the adoption rate has a lot to do with the availability of "US$ 2.99 hosting" options, most of which offer PHP. So, it can be popular both because it's a really good option, because it's dirt cheap or a combination of both.

You emphasize the rapid results thing, which is good - if the larval programmer doesn't get some feedback, he or she won't stay interested long enough to learn. But there are other ways of giving feedback - a GUI, for instance. Or printing to the console. No web is required here except for the reason PHP is web-centric.

And then, there are the structural problems with PHP. No namespaces, too much magic in type conversions and so on. Believe-me: I have seen a generation of programmers lost because they were poisoned by Clipper and then by VB. They never really recovered. Maybe ther never will.