I hate to sound like an apologist, but the fact it was 2 years of Rails code thrown out in 2007 seems highly relevant to the context of the article. This was a

I hate to sound like an apologist, but the fact it was 2 years of Rails code thrown out in 2007 seems highly relevant to the context of the article. This was also a rewrite. He already shot himself in the foot with PHP the first time around, then chose this brand new thing called Rails as his basis of a new codebase about as early as humanly possible without your initials being 'DHH', then went back to PHP for several reasons, some of which are still hotly debated today (SQL vs ORMs, frameworks vs. custom code or minimal frameworks, etc). It's disingenuous to draw any conclusions about Ruby or Rails today from its state 7 years ago (likewise for PHP).