True though the average PHP developper is usually cheaper than the Go or Java one. Paying people is usually more expensive than buying server instances on Amazon.
High end PHP dev is as hard as Java .. The problem is that the high end PHP frameworks are at the bottom of the list...
> The frameworks towards the top are generally lower level - they do less automatic 'magic' than the more popular frameworks that handle things like validation automatically.
Not really Spring,Struts,etc ... are not really low level.
There is a paradigm shift today. There is more and more demand for realtime apps. And these cannot take advantage of http proxying or caching. So the solutions that perform badely at concurency will not be seen as relevant in the future.