Agreed. As is often brought up in PHP threads, the biggest thing is universal adoption of PHP in web hosting. People learning how to stitch together web pages aren't going to grab a VPS, learn the complexity of managing the server, and use something complex like Rails (where there's a language, a framework, and MVC to learn).

With PHP --> the newbie just has to FTP the files up and it works. Fewer variables to manage, fewer things to learn. You go from 0 to 60 much faster. Now, you probably will go from 60 to 100 much much slower than with a different stack, but that's a different discussion...

I agree, and I think that means it will be very difficult for any language that requires more understanding of OOP concepts to get started with will have a hard time competing with PHP in this arena.