PHP is most definitely an alternative to Rails or Django. Just as going raw WSGI in Python is.
> PHP is a language, Rails/Django are frameworks and thus necessarily far-more complex.
Which completely misses the point of the linked comment, which is that PHP deployment is utterly trivial and that the mapping between URLs and PHP code is extremely simple to understand, creating a very low cognitive load on the user.
Replace "Rails/Django" by "Ruby/Rack or Python/WSGI" and you have the same level of abstraction as PHP (well probably lower actually as you don't get stuff like $GET/$POST/$GET), yet you still don't get trivial deployments and easy-to-understand mapping between code files and URLs.
> PHP is a language, Rails/Django are frameworks and thus necessarily far-more complex.
Which completely misses the point of the linked comment, which is that PHP deployment is utterly trivial and that the mapping between URLs and PHP code is extremely simple to understand, creating a very low cognitive load on the user.
Replace "Rails/Django" by "Ruby/Rack or Python/WSGI" and you have the same level of abstraction as PHP (well probably lower actually as you don't get stuff like $GET/$POST/$GET), yet you still don't get trivial deployments and easy-to-understand mapping between code files and URLs.