[smartstakestime]

rails did the opposite of php , and I think its harder for it to pivot in its community.

-php started with no framework , everyone just did super minimal strait to the db and template query stuff, very unorganized but you knew the underlying apis and tech because you were right up against them

-rails started very ridged. separating programmers from the underlying apis and tech

Now php devs had to create the ecosystem of organization but the experience of working with the the server and db was still useful particularly when doing something unique or when one needed special performance

Ruby devs needed to learn to become leaner how to break away from the framework when performance was needed. This was completely new and I feel the community did not support scripting away from ruby. Mostly the community was focused around ease

also at the same time PHP was improving the language. I dont think Ruby had the same improvement and some of the stuff I have heard about ruby makes me cringe.

http://rubylearning.com/blog/2010/09/27/almost-everything-is...

[pjmlp]

Also PHP benefited from Facebook's work and the commmunity actually cared about performance. Zend exists since the early days, now there there is the JIT migration going on.

On the other hand JRuby doesn't seem to be having that much adoption, and the new pseudo-JIT via C compilation doesn't seem to be the best way to improve it.