There are more popular and worse languages, for example Javascript: - no classes (so people end up emulating them: Backbone has methods to emulate class declar

There are more popular and worse languages, for example Javascript: - no classes (so people end up emulating them: Backbone has methods to emulate class declaration and class inheritance) - no type hinting. You cannot specify function argument type or return type. It makes code harder to read and to maintain. - too forgiving. You can divide by zero or mistype a property name and get no error. You can add arrays to strings. It makes bugs harder to find. - no coding standard. Everyone uses whatever style they like - no single modules standard - no syntax for asynchronous operations - difficult to install XML library on Windows (you need to setup a Visual Studio to compile binary modules) > Heroku + Ruby on Rails gets close[1], but it took them nearly 10 years to catch up. You have to learn Linux and command line to use Ruby. No wonder it is more difficult for a newbie. Deploying and running an application is more complicated in Ruby. Also with long-living applications it is easy to get a memory leak. But recently PHP started to depend more on CLI tools too (installing and using composer might be not easy for people who got used to GUI and don't understand concepts like "working directory").