Well PHP was written by someone, too, and that improved productivity over what came before (CGI/C++?). Django and Rails aren't really central to my argument - t

Well PHP was written by someone, too, and that improved productivity over what came before (CGI/C++?). Django and Rails aren't really central to my argument - they can be replaced with any language/library/framework that boosts productivity. Careful about saying 'least abstracting' though - if it really is faster (not my experience, but assuming it is), then although it might not appear to be a powerful abstraction, it actually is, at least in some way. Your abstractions (done well) are exactly what I'm talking about - long term productivity. Given 100 minutes you may well be well behind (if you've even started actually coding), but will that still be true 100 days later if the other guy is writing it in straight, hackish PHP?