Everyone thought all Rails code was inherently amazing in 2006, but that’s because it was very new and was therefore being used mostly by good, experienced programmers. But look around today, with Rails about 8 years old, and there’s a lot of crap out there written in it, too. PHP has been extremely popular for almost twice as long.

Rails’ initial appeal had little to do with the Ruby language: its primary innovation was bringing the modern MVC framework and structure to web apps, rather than having a directory of PHP files sloppily mixing layout with logic. It was a better structure than what most PHP programmers were doing in 2006, but that structure was quickly copied by good PHP programmers and frameworks. There was nothing about the language that made it impossible to use PHP 5 the same way, especially since PHP 5.3 added closures and late static binding in 2009. 

Facebook’s original 2009 HipHop compiled PHP to C++ to then build binaries. Recently, they deprecated that and replaced it with HHVM as a more convenient JIT VM.