Providing sanitization functions 10 years ago is broken to you? If you check my earlier post you'll see that prepared statements are widely used nowadays. Escaping functions like htmlentities() are also still effective.
You are right, there are a bunch of hosting company providing 0-config PHP, but setting it up in any distro is also never more than one command away, unlike the other languages mentioned.
Regarding Ruby and RoR, I can't even find a tutorial on how to run Ruby under FastCGI, and RoR appears to be the de facto way to run Ruby websites, so if having a framework is required to run any non-trivial Ruby website, then it has to go into the "hard to configure" part of the argument regardless of semantics.
You are right, there are a bunch of hosting company providing 0-config PHP, but setting it up in any distro is also never more than one command away, unlike the other languages mentioned.
Regarding Ruby and RoR, I can't even find a tutorial on how to run Ruby under FastCGI, and RoR appears to be the de facto way to run Ruby websites, so if having a framework is required to run any non-trivial Ruby website, then it has to go into the "hard to configure" part of the argument regardless of semantics.