Why the light has gone out on LAMP

I have no idea how things like this make news sites like slashdot (or maybe I do I guess…). It's a couple paragraph rant that contains no real facts, huge generalizations and not much more. The fact is, MySQL and PHP are just fine if you use them correctly. Ask Yahoo! if they scale. The thing is both will allow you to be lazy, but that's your fault – not theirs. The fact is, with PHP5 and MySQL 4.1/5.x both offer feature rich solutions that are highly scalable. One thing I notice about PHP and MySQL bashers, is that they are stuck in MySQL 3.23 and PHP 4 land. Things like:
For years the MySQL developers were quite vocal that things like referential integrity, transactions, subselects, etc were little more than baggage that could be done better another way. Let me clue you in: you need these things or you need to let someone else handle your database work for you.
Let me clue you in – MySQL has supported these things for a long time now. Now, don't get be wrong – PHP and MySQL historically had major problems (very real problems – like magic quotes and register_globals being on by default) and still do have some problems. If you are going to bash them, at least know what you are bashing, as opposed to comparing them to BASIC..which is really a bit silly. PostgreSQL and Python are both great, but as always the right tool for the right job (and knowing what each tool actually does is a huge part of that).
–jeremy
MySQL, PHP, Open Source, LAMP