To me the article's perspective misses the point. The language itself is just a vehicle for encapsulating data and logic, etc. for some purpose. A framework adds levels of tools and abstractions to "take care" of common situations. The small units can be modules that one employs within a framework, such as an authentication mechanism within a web app. I feel just the opposite of the author: the language is only as useful as the tools available to take superfluous overhead of shared tasks off my hands. The excessive fragmentation of the PHP framework scene is the main reason driving me toward Rails, and thus Ruby. I don't have any practical arguments against PHP and for Ruby, but I'm dismayed that I can't find a current midstream PHP framework like symfony1 was, with great community support, that's easy enough to adapt to a wide variety of projects. Looking into the Rails community (I still haven't rolled a project), I feel like Rails accomplishes that.