Your response reads to me like you think I was dunking on PHP, but I wasn't. I don't feel like PHP is a particularly great language to write a DSL-style web framework in, but that's largely because -- as I was trying to suggest with the part about "Use Composer to pull in specific packages you really need" -- modern PHP mostly just doesn't feel like it needs a framework to me. That's precisely because, as you put it, PHP was built ONLY for the web, and the language's earlier quirkiness has really been smoothed over in the last decade. I like PHP. We are closer to being in agreement than you may think. :)

(Although I might take Ruby over PHP, depending on specific circumstances. Ruby is just such a nice language, and Rails has gotten pretty darn good once it stopped being "interesting" and could settle down to making itself productive. Maybe that will one day happen with Node…)