[lukaszkups]

As a front-end developer I can agree with that.

Many times when I've wanted to install something for my needs, like forum engine or something similar, I was looking only for an PHP option.

Why?

Because it really is a copy-paste process with typing credentials to your database into dedicated file. No need to know any language/framework-specific commands, and no need to be overwhelmed by missing dependencies.

And in huge addition to that, simple PHP hosting is extremely cheap - for years I've been paying for my personal server ~$20 PER YEAR, where servers that enables you to use Node/Ruby etc. costs around at least $10 per month. This is a huge game changer for me.

[joelbluminator]

Discourse is a pretty complicated piece of software (relatively). They do: mailing list, discussion forum, long-form chat room, This isn't gonna be some static blog, it's feature heavy. It needs redis, it needs some real-time chat capabilities etc etc. Also the choice to use a framework (Rails in this instance) was sound since it's complicated. So when comparing deployments you need to compare it to the php equivalent (Laravel). I think deployment and memory footprint are gonna be quite similar then.

[disgruntledphd2]

So is facebook, and they wrote a lot of PHP for their first decade.