Why PHP continues to thrive in the age of the PaaS

Just as you'd never want to use an AED at a hospital (unless every medical professional was unavailable)

The only possible way to program PHP is to be pretty much ignorant of everything in which case PHP will actually do kinda what you wanted. If you learned PHP then either it's not actually doing what you think it's doing, or some config variable changed and would have done what you thought except it didn't, but don't worry just add some code to change that config variable for a while, and then change it back.

PHP is zen.

There is a story of a young, but earnest PHP student who approached his teacher, and asked the Master, "If I work very hard and diligently, how long will it take for me to learn PHP?"

The Master thought about this, then replied, "Ten years."

The student then said, "But what if I work very, very hard and really apply myself to learn fast. How long then?"

Replied the Master, "Well, twenty years."

"But, if I really, really work at it, how long then?" asked the student.

"Thirty years," replied the Master.

"But, I do not understand," said the disappointed student, "at each time that I say I will work harder, you say it will take me longer. Why do you say that?"

Replied the Master, "When you have one eye on the goal, you only have one eye on the path."

Mainly because people rarely talk about pure Ruby/Python/Node CGI development. They're almost always run through an app server.

I realise there are indeed some excellent PHP frameworks nowadays, but to my knowledge, most can still be run in a basic CGI environment. And more to the point, probably the majority of quick hacks in PHP are still done without any framework.

[BTW I meant Meteor, not Metro.]

If you already know RoR and have your dev machine and deployment environment all set up, then it's not hard to get a Rails app working. Rails has a significant advantage with the use of gems (and bundler, etc.) for easily adding complex features.

I still use PHP for my home projects most of the time because I haven't bothered to set up Rails on my VPS, so the effort it would take to do so just isn't worth it compared to how easily I can drop a PHP app in place. (I am using a framework in PHP too.)

But then, the author was talking about PaaS not setting up Ruby on a VPS. So in that case it's probably just about how comfortable the developer is with each language. I'm a bit more comfortable with PHP because I don't like debugging Ruby GEMs that use instance_eval black magic for DSLs and/or have to be inserted as Rack middleware. Not unless the project is large enough to make Ruby gems worth it.

(Eg. if I want good unit and integration testing. For home projects I rarely do integration testing. E.g. #2 was rack middle ware for REST API.)

This, however, is going to be an unpopular opinion amongst the PHP crowd, but I can distill the rest of your comment into the following statement: "PHP is thriving because companies are cheap, don't care about quality as much as cost, and there is an over-abundant labor supply of poorly skilled, mainly self-taught PHP 'developers' who are willing to work for peanuts and get the job done to an adequate level." There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but trying to turn it on its head by implying developers skilled with, e.g. Ruby/Rails frameworks (see note below), are essentially overpaid and narrow-minded is just absurd.

Note: I especially am not a fan of Ruby, so don't take this as a defense of the language or its developer-adherents. I'm actually fairly language agnostic; "right tool for the right job" and all that.