Exactly. I detest PHP, but I've used it to quickly build a sign-up website for an event. If you pair PHP with an interface library like Bootstrap and an ORM like Paris/Idiorm you can have something up and running cheaply and quickly. Is it maintainable? No, but that's not important in this case.
edit: let me clarify, I don't assert that ALL php code is unmaintainable, just the quick site I built. Though if you're in the mood to argue: statically typed languages are infinitely more maintainable than dynamically typed ones in my opinion.
Anyone who has worked with codebases in multiple languages for any length of time realizes that's a wrong statement. Maintainable is, to some degree, in the eye of the beholder (and often author), but you can write unmaintainable code in any platform. Everyone seems to love RoR - I inherited a Rails 1 app written over 18 months that still didn't work right, and was essentially unupgradeable - every piece of advice from every Ruby person I talked to was "just start over in Rails 2 and port some of the old logic over".
OK - so now I'm talking 'upgradeable' vs 'maintainable'. Try to 'maintain' a Rails 1 app in 2011 - simply searching for how to do certain things in Rails 1 is pretty hard to do, because the docs are wrong/outdated or simply gone.
But hey - "Ruby is maintainable, PHP sucks", right?
Give me a well-thought out Zend Framework app written by a senior developer with experience writing good code vs Rails hacked together by someone with 2 weeks of udemy lessons under their belt any day.
edit: let me clarify, I don't assert that ALL php code is unmaintainable, just the quick site I built. Though if you're in the mood to argue: statically typed languages are infinitely more maintainable than dynamically typed ones in my opinion.