"I bet most people who use/used PHP got there because it was popular"<p>This is fairly accurate, but not quite the whole story.<p>Ascribing PHP's success to "popularity" makes it sound like a simple fashion statement. The reality is that, due to its popularity, PHP has a ton of libraries and an enormous base of existing code (ranging from little hacks to parse a certain data format all the way up to full-blown applications like MediaWiki). It's not just the language, it's the ecosystem.<p>That's a real advantage that's often overlooked by those who advocate other languages. Also, don't forget that PHP hosting is cheap and ubiquitous. Rails, not so much.<p>That said, Ruby is catching up pretty fast, and I've been using Ruby (and sometimes Rails) for any new project that isn't tightly coupled with existing code. For me, writing Ruby is vastly more pleasant and efficient than writing PHP, even though I've been using PHP for five years and Ruby for only one. <p>I still write a lot of Java, too, but JRuby is starting to eat into that pretty fast. It's an end run around the library/existing code problem.<p>