Ask HN: What are current trends in webdeveloping? 16 years ago
Answer: It's not!
PHP is easy to understand, easy to deploy, and very flexible. Of course with flexibility and ease of use comes ease of abuse, but that's true of most any language. As for people shying away from so called enterprise languages like Java and .NET, that simply is not true, at least where Microsoft technologies are concerned. ASP, C#, and .NET built on Microsoft DB stacks are faster, and more scalable than similar web apps built on LAMP or RoR stacks. Check out Stack Overflow. I would switch to Microsoft technologies in a second if they were more affordable to get started with. As for Ruby or PHP, choose the one you like programming with. Neither is better or more popular in the real world.