Neither you nor Derek Sivers has made a case for PHP being the best language for large-scale web apps. In fact, Sivers only makes one argument for PHP: it's "small and fast". The rest of his arguments are either against Rails or against switching platforms for part of a production system that still needs to integrate with the old platform.

Unsupported blanket statements don't contribute anything useful to the discussion.

Sorry you're right I didn't make any kind of a case. In making claims I prefer statistics to theoretical proofs. I would rather take a quick look at the statistics of large-scale web apps than make any kind of formalized argument about which is better: PHP or Ruby.

I don't have any numbers off hand(I will find some when I have some free time) but I would assume PHP has 10x more large scale websites than Rails.

That's case closed for me. Although Rails is nice and fun. But if I have to make a business decision today, its PHP all the way.

So your argument can be summarized as "I guess PHP is the best option"? That still sounds like an unsupported opinion.

Let's assume you're right, and that there are ten times as many "large scale" (whatever that means) websites running on PHP as Rails. That might mean that an equal number of people have tried building large scale websites using PHP and Rails, and that ten times as many failed using Rails as PHP. Do you think that's the case?

5 minutes of searching on Google fails to return any conclusive numbers, but PHP certainly seems to be several times more popular than Rails. PHP has also been around for 13 years, while Rails was first released to the public just three years ago. Both have been gaining popularity since their introduction, which suggests an explanation for the greater number of large scale PHP sites having nothing to do with the suitability of the tools: PHP has been around longer and has more users. If you want to measure like that, you should be programming in Java, not PHP.

The number of projects attempted and failed with a given toolset is a much better indication of its suitability than overall popularity. Even that can fail though. I suspect a greater proportion of Rails projects succeed than PHP, but I don't think Rails is the reason in a direct sense. I think the sort of people who choose Rails are more likely to succeed than those who choose PHP.

" I think the sort of people who choose Rails are more likely to succeed than those who choose PHP."

I'm sorry I don't quite get you here. Could you clarify this statement...cuz it sounds a hell alot like the elitist BS that is being peddled around by Rails fan boys as of late.

I drew a different conclusion - PHP is a better language than the rails environment for projects which were already written in PHP.

I would agree. (and I'm a diehard ror guy now)

I had this crufty old php4 app that started gathering dust because it was so painful to touch.

The thought of rewriting all of it in ruby was just too painful, as well. (and not worth the effort) Like Derek's story, it wasn't just the customer-facing site but all of the little helper scripts, admin control panels and everything that were in PHP.