I think if you combine Ruby on Rails and 'Ruby on Rails Token' it's larger than PHP. It's strange to me that they track this by their own detection algorithm instead of aggregating based on framework.
And if that's true, why aren't there more php articles and comments on HN? Are php developers that uninterested and apathetic about their own language?
The PHP community isn't terribly vocal. Probably because it's been around for ages and the dos and don't are very well understood by people who care to know.
I personally don't read many PHP related articles because, well, there isn't much new to learn. It's an old/stable language with well understood constructs.
Part of the problem is that the Rails community being as vocal as they are make it seem like everyone is using rails. In this case perception is not reality.
You do have a point. Pretty same is the case with perl I think. Libararies are already there for ages and matured.
I'm not into web development stuff, but I thought currently big projects prefer not to use PHP. People say PHP helps them to find cheap programmers, but I dont think good PHP guys can be hired at low rate anyway.