I love coding in PHP, but, I read a lot of articles that deplore PHP for a variety of reasons. I am sick and tired of hearing that my favorite language for web programming sucks! Here are a few articles that I would like some of the advanced users here at TalkPHP to comment upon:
???? blog Ruby vs PHP performance
PythonVsPhp - PythonInfo Wiki

I have heard a lot of good things about Python (namspaces,OO, et al). As I am still young is it worthwhile to get acquainted with say, Python?

Another question, what is this obsession with OOP? People talk a lot about inheritance and namespaces being primary reason to use OOP, but, most of the classes that I had come across (at say phpclasses.org) could be implemented with just plain functions. Is there a price in performance that one has to pay if one chose to use a class instead of a function? Can someone point me to an example where using a class is better than using a function. Some smart Programmers like Paul Graham say they never had use for OOP (he along with a few others built Viaweb, a shopping portal, which I think later got converted into Yahoo Stores, so it was definitely a big project that he had coded for)