@davidrevoy While I had a reasonably good experience with PHP (mystery surrounds the origins of the name, but appears to have something to do with someone's Home Page...) there was one 'security feature' that threw me.
A hashing function which I thought could be used for trapdoor encryption of passwords turned out to only operate on the first two characters of the input string! 'For' and 'Four' would both be accepted. Useful.
(Quietly switched to using LDAP after that)