I don't think its really reasonable to say 'X sucks' without taking uses cases into account. While PHP has a number of shortcomings, it is great for things where ruby/rails would be huge waste of time. Build some small brochure websites in rails, and build the same ones in PHP. I bet you'll be done much sooner & deployed more cost effectively using PHP. This might not be the kind of work you aspire to doing, but I think the example still holds.