[stephenr]

The claimed productivity boost was between vanilla PHP and Rails, so it's already a poor comparison.

Add to that, the reason he was using vanilla PHP is because he couldn't choose a framework, and his whole argument seems pretty flimsy to me.

[pkkk]

Vanilla PHP by itself is a framework (as template language for the web) with many API that vanilla Ruby is not providing. If you will compare both in this way it will be poor comparison too right ? My point is that you can't compare PHP with anything on the market in this dimensions.

PHP could be productive in the past, currently PHP frameworks are trying to fix fundamental flaws of language architecture and my subjective opinions is that they are constantly failing, language can't be fixed by building frameworks on top of it. This is IMHO the big win for Rails, Django, Node.js, they don't fix the language, they just don't need to, they extend it and provide productive framework to complete much different task, build end-user application right ?

[stephenr]

No, PHP is not a framework, it's a language.

[jigs_up]

People say PHP is a templating language because it allows inline code. I think that's what he meant.