Every line of that code I don't have to write makes me feel more like living. I almost would rather develop in assembly no strike that I would rather develop in assembly language.

JSON is not a library pack, it's a data format - though there are many libraries for working with JSON.

So twice as many people are writing their web apps in straight PHP than PHP in conjunction with Apache/MySQL/Linux?

Does this mean that many more people are using Postgres/IIS/Windows servers with PHP or just that the LAMP acronym was missed/misunderstood by respondents?

Also, are people writing 'raw' AJAX code (without a library) because they're not making extensive use of AJAX in their projects? I would not enjoy developing any 'proper' AJAX-based application without /some/ kind of library in place... a snippet of AJAX in an otherwise AJAX-less project would be OK though.

You could write Ajax apps in PHP also on a WAMP stack

or any other Operating System, Database combinations .

LAMP is just the most common combination