[mattmcknight]

PHP does not feel "old and safe". It's probably not the right comparison point to Rails, which is more like CakePHP or Symfony, or the various frameworks influenced by Rails.

Having worked on Rails since 2005, I think the bigger problem is that it has become more complex, and harder to get started with, as the pendulum swings from eliminated.

One bigger change is probably as you state, that we will get away from frameworks whose primary responsibility is generating HTML, which affects all of these things similarly, and node.js would get caught up in the same thing.

Another big change is the pendulum swing from Object/Relational systems to Functional/BigData systems. This is a big mental shift for programmers trained in the Object-Oriented approach.