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. [...] 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.

Categories the languages were rated on included ease of use, extensibility, community, availability of tools and memory management. PHP got high marks on most with a few (like client-side scripting) lagging behind. Cal sees it from two angles, though - one to celebrate how far PHP has come and the other to look forward to see what things the language needs to improve on.