Comment by avdi

I deliberately used a dated example because I figure it would probably ring a bell with a lot of people. Realistically this is a choice a lot of people were probably making around 5 years ago, and the answer at the time would almost undoubtedly have been PHP. Or Java/JSP. From what I've seen I think PHP is a pretty horrid language, and we all know how boring Java is. But the point is five years ago they were both well documented and it was easy to find answers if you got stuck, which wasn't as true of the others, especially for web programming purposes. Once you learned PHP it would have been pretty easy to understand where Rails or Django was coming from as they became popular, and "get" how they differed from PHP and why it mattered.