To some degree it is relevant (it's not about fixing the transmission of a Ford Cortina) just not very relevant given the changes both languages have undergone

To some degree it is relevant (it's not about fixing the transmission of a Ford Cortina) just not very relevant given the changes both languages have undergone in the intervening times. If you are a PHP programmer how would you view an article about someone who started to use Drupal found that they didn't like some aspects of it and switched to programming in Java. You would probably think that giving up on PHP because of a framework when there are plenty of others to choose from was pretty short sighted and was representing PHP unfairly. This is why comparing Rails, which is a framework, to PHP, which is a programming language, feels wrong. Rails is not the only framework, it just feels like it :D