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I don't have any skin in this game, but I see no good reason to vote down this reasonable question. Sometimes I wonder what people mean with their down votes? I'm pretty sure we don't all mean the same things.

>Sometimes I wonder what people mean with their down votes?

Same here -- i'm often looking for the reasons why some very reasonable topics are voted down. Perhaps you could provide a "reason" dropdown instead of just a yes or no vote? It will also make people think more about saying "no".

Cheers,
Andrew

People most likely vote it down as an implicit disagreement with the suggestion that PHP would have been better. The same question asked with Java in place of PHP would likely have been voted up by the majority in this community (i.e. former JavaLobby and TSS dwellers).

Why not Java for Google’s App Engine?

With these voting engines, people don't often vote on the quality of the content or the question posed. They use their vote to agree or disagree with the content, or to answer the question. Find a solution to that problem, and you've found the next innovation in this space.

Clinton

blame digg! it's all black & white :P

Because this guy offers no compelling reason for WHY PHP should have been used. All he says is there are more PHP developers out there. Since Google is initially limiting to 10,000 people, why should they care about the user base for the initial language they're offering? If you look at what they had to do to make it safe, they basically hacked up a version of Python that doesn't allow you access to any system level resources. I imagine this is easier when you have so much Python talent around. Also it's probably much harder to make an SDK like they offer in a speciality language like PHP instead of a better general purpose language like Python.