Cracks in the Foundation (PHP Advent)

It seems to me that all the web scripting languages are pretty horrible in some (or several) regard. PHP, somehow, has managed to survive (and thrive!), despite making pretty much every single 'easy way' to do things a security nightmare.

Are there really any out there that can ACTUALLY scale up well to a huge number of concurrent users without having to spend a massive amount of time planning? (or writing your own VM!) I've not really kept up to date on the latest developments, but node.js seemed like it was promising to make it easier to make scalable websites without intense planning and design (at least from the language side- data storage scaling is still left to the user/library/DB devs).