[slurgfest]

"PHP is about getting stuff done."

This implies that the road not taken by PHP (and thus the roads taken by other languages) are somehow unproductive. That's not accurate. Most languages are about getting stuff done. A tool can be explicit, or elegant, or whatever, and also help you get stuff done.

You are basically saying that PHP's design is at a global maximum for productivity and this is simply not true.

[Firehed]

I think it was intended to mean that it eschews some advanced/clever functionality in favor of having a shallow learning curve. That doesn't make it the best tool for the job (nor does it prevent it from being so), but it implies that you can get started on solving your problem in thirty seconds rather than having to spend two hours prepping your dev environment and web stack any time you want to make a change.