Have you used PHP? Spend 5 minutes with it and you'll understand; a very expressive language, simple to learn, massive library of functions, massive number of examples to copy, no framework to learn, no syntactical overhead like in Java, practically everything works with, or has bindings for PHP.
I prefer to work in python, but I don't much care anymore, each language has it's strengths and weakness' but PHP most definitely is good for getting things done "very very quickly"
Yes you can get up and running quickly with php, but my comment was mostly about the fact that it is not much slower in other languages (most of the time not slower at all).
And yes I did a lot of PHP but that was 5-6 years ago. I know things have changed a lot since then but the language still has a lot of the same flaws.
Despite the stigma attached to PHP, it's my go to language for web stuff because it gets shit done very very quickly.
You can't beat drop file, edit, refresh and entire deployments which can be done with cp/scp and no process restarts.