Not so long ago, before the rise of Node.js and when it seemed like Rails was The Way of the Future (tm) and everyone was really down on PHP, I used to joke that there was a silver lining to PHP becoming the next COBOL: there weren't many COBOL jobs around, but there also weren't many COBOL programmers around, and if you needed a COBOL programmer the chances were that you really needed a COBOL programmer.

As things have played out, PHP has done pretty well at modernizing (I know some would debate that, but that's a different thread), and Rails has faded a bit into the background -- although now I joke that because Rails is well out of its fad phase, it can get down to the real work.

I do wonder whether Rails has been kind of a mixed blessing for Ruby all in all, though. I think Ruby is, in itself, a great alternative to Python or Perl, and it's the language I reach for first when I'm writing short utility scripts -- but since Rails exploded in popularity before Ruby itself did, a lot of Ruby programmers really only know Ruby to the degree they know Rails.