Lambdas and recursion are only a small part of the decision for a programming language. There are many, many deliberations in picking a language.
Availability on the target platform (cheap web hosters?), availability of libraries, familiarity with the language (of the entire team, both current and in the future), purpose (aiming to get to the market quickly, or trying to learn a new language?), compatibility or integration with an existing code base, et cetera.
All these deliberations taken together may lead to a decision to use PHP. If so, it is nice to have lambdas and recursion. "It's better in another language" is without meaning in that case, because the feature is so small compared to the other deliberations. It quickly turns into the better question: "is it good enough?"
Availability on the target platform (cheap web hosters?), availability of libraries, familiarity with the language (of the entire team, both current and in the future), purpose (aiming to get to the market quickly, or trying to learn a new language?), compatibility or integration with an existing code base, et cetera.
All these deliberations taken together may lead to a decision to use PHP. If so, it is nice to have lambdas and recursion. "It's better in another language" is without meaning in that case, because the feature is so small compared to the other deliberations. It quickly turns into the better question: "is it good enough?"