$language is better depending on the circumstances. PHP is very good for building small websites, I'd say almost ideal in some ways. Whether or not it works well in other fields is debatable. (Note: large companies using it successfully is not a good measure of something working well.)
Additionally PHP is inherently slow not because of the interpreter but because of the design the language. Most websites aren't affected by this because many of the functions in the standard library are implemented in C and are very fast.
