You're quite right that the analogy isn't perfect. The point I was trying to make, though, is precisely that PHP development can proceed without any recourse whatsoever to a framework. Jumping straight into web dev without an accompanying framework like Rails or Sinatra is a complete non-starter if you're a Rubyist.
So you're quite right, but I hope you would agree that the Rails/PHP comparison, in spite of its imperfections, is compatible with the point I was trying to make.
Yes, I agree. You make the point a lot better here than in your linked post - i.e. with PHP, you can 'just start'. With Ruby you need to choose a framework, understand enough about how it works, and where things go before you can even start to do "hello world"
I got my start with Ruby web development using ERB in a CGI script. Same with Perl before and Python after. The option to do that has not been taken away.
I'm just mad about the title. The post was about how PHP is quick and dirty for simple stuff. The reason all of the other web frameworks exist is because once you get past the learning curve, you can accomplish a lot in a very short span of time. If anything, they are the powerhouses, not PHP.
PHP has some of the most robust and modern frameworks available today. Symfony draws on the best of almost every modern framework, and leaves a lot of the crap behind.
It depends on how you define powerhouse. Is PHP my favorite language or framework? No. But the use cases I provide show that it's worthy of consideration.
Maybe. I actually like Perl a lot, and there are lots of things you can do with it that you'd never want to use PHP for. The difference is that in the world of web development (and this is the crucial distinction here), Perl has neither the use cases nor the easy uptake nor the development frameworks (Drupal, Joomla, Zend, CodeIgniter, etc.) that PHP has. And so my comment wasn't against Perl tout court.
