You can do anything web related with PHP, it might not be the coolest kid in town but it gets every job done pretty well in the space it has been designed for. Use a framework like symfony and large scale applications with decent design are no problem at all in PHP. Same is true for Python, Ruby etc though, so just use what suits you best. Comparing it to C ? Dunno, completely different animals. I wouldnt do web dev in C, but i also wouldnt do graphics programming in PHP. Just because they both are not designed with OO at the core doesnt mean they are exactly the same.