In reply to Rick.

Again, appreciate the overview, but also agree to disagree :) I mentioned .NET 1.0 simply because it was a disrespectful 100% clone of Java and they closed it and claimed that it's unique, new and what not. I've seen VS 2013 and it's a pig as well, speaking about performance and calling out a heavy IDE is a bold move! :)

You mentioned Apache mods being faster than PHP (which is normal) but you haven't benchmarked them against a .NET environment that does the same. Moreover, you don't account the amount of RAM for a .NET/Java app since their VMs load everything in RAM so that the bytecode/IL is properly executed on the fly. Since PHP is interpretative, it takes a certain amount of time every time, unless you compile it with phc, phalanger or something else. Not to mention that apache < nginx < hhvm, so there is that.

I'll stop that here since it's getting out of the scope of the post. I used to love the type of flame wars - and I actually agree that they should happen way more often in the WordPress community since the majority of the people are unaware of what technologies are available out there, how are they any better, or even 101 things such as the difference between compiled and interpretative languages or what's all the fuss about multithreading. Feel free to start a blog (or a section) about these, I'm sure they'll get some decent attention - could be on dzone, reddit or somewhere else too.