Kevin Schroeder has an interesting post to his site about how Google is finally acknowledging PHP exists and how it's "exploding on Google App Engine"...but it's only happening just now.

How is it that one of the most despised programming languages in the word is running (as Google claims) up to 75% of the web? Many nay-sayers will say “oh it’s just WordPress” or “oh, it’s just PHPbb”. But in doing that they are completely missing the point. [...] In the article Venture Beat says “PHP is moving to the Enterprise very quickly”. This is not true. PHP IS in the enterprise and has been for a long time. People just either don’t know it or refused to admit it.

He talks about the things that PHP does, including something interesting - it exposes the focus on the theoretical (the "ivory tower" as he puts it) and puts the focus back on the practical, real-life world of just getting things done. He suggests that Google's reasoning behind taking so long to get PHP up and running on the App Engine was just someone with "their blinders on" to the world of the practical that PHP fills so well.