Having built websites in PHP, Python, Ruby, and Clojure ... guess what? They all present you with equal challenges if you're not building trivial small websites on shared hosting.
I've built websites in PHP, Python, Common Lisp, and RXML/Pike. Some have been very small, and some have been medium-sized. I currently work on a several-hundred-thousand-line PHP codebase, and I don't think being in PHP has been a serious problem for it.
I do agree that language infrastructure is more important for small projects, and language power is more important for large projects. I think it's critical to provide good language infrastructure precisely because of this, though, since virtually everyone starts out learning a language with a small project! It's really easy to bounce off of CL, when you're first starting out, as easily demonstrated by a survey of c.l.l (at least, when I paid attention there 2003-2007), and it's not because of the language itself; it's because the infrastructure is (was?) severely lacking.
I think it's harder to build a good infrastructure with a more powerful language, ironically, because the power substitutes for things that would otherwise be infrastructure-related, and once you've learned enough of the language to work on infrastructure, you no longer care so much.
I've built websites in PHP, Python, Common Lisp, and RXML/Pike. Some have been very small, and some have been medium-sized. I currently work on a several-hundred-thousand-line PHP codebase, and I don't think being in PHP has been a serious problem for it.
I do agree that language infrastructure is more important for small projects, and language power is more important for large projects. I think it's critical to provide good language infrastructure precisely because of this, though, since virtually everyone starts out learning a language with a small project! It's really easy to bounce off of CL, when you're first starting out, as easily demonstrated by a survey of c.l.l (at least, when I paid attention there 2003-2007), and it's not because of the language itself; it's because the infrastructure is (was?) severely lacking.
I think it's harder to build a good infrastructure with a more powerful language, ironically, because the power substitutes for things that would otherwise be infrastructure-related, and once you've learned enough of the language to work on infrastructure, you no longer care so much.