He's just saying that frameworks like Rails are inherently slower, and all the magic (like scaffolding etc.) isn't really worth it.
He also says: > Ruby as a language is great, I think it's a really clean and nice language. There just aren't that many people who know it well.
Also, the PHP framework world blows, I tried Zend's Framework, Cake, and Symfony when I had a boss that refused to use anything non-PHP, and they just don't have feature parity with Rails (though this was a year ago). They also don't have as many mature plugins available as Rails (and a web programming language lives and dies by its libraries).
Also, in my experience there are plenty of libraries available for PHP. It comes with a lot more built in functionality than other languages.
What I like about PHP over Ruby is that it has a more comfortable C-like syntax. In comparison Ruby is more like Basic than C. When I use Ruby I miss the simple curly braces of C or PHP. In my humble opinion that is a much better way of defining blocks of code.
I also don't like Ruby's syntax in this regard. However I long for the simple ways of Haskell, Clean and Python here, using indentation.
"But there are performance issues with the scaffolding and stuff, and they recognise that, which is why the new build will be better."
Any rails dev could tell you that scaffolding is irrelevant to the performance of a typical rails app. Yet he mentions "scaffolding and stuff".
Also, DHH has said numerous times that scaffolding is mostly just a development tool. I think people who still trot it out as one of the problems with Rails are deliberately ignoring what he said.
Referring to a screencast that's four or more years old so as to knock something today is dopey. It would be like complaining today about PHP3 speed and syntax.
Seems pretty clear Mr. Lerdorf has very little knowledge of Rails, and likely very little interest in changing that.
"But when they needed to do something real, they thought, 'Oh crap, I don't know Ruby very well!'"
Pretty sure that's true for people who hear good things about any [Perl|PHP|Python] framework and decide to pick it up. Usually people then just learn the language.
PHP might have a brighter future if its BDFL wasn't so myopic about other languages.
Visit Ruby On Rails' homepage (http://rubyonrails.org/) and click "Screencasts" on the top menu bar. Click the first one, "Creating a weblog in 15 minutes with Rails 2". Watch. That's what I'm referring to, but it's not much different than the original screencast you're referring to.
If that is as far as someone gets in trying to get an understanding of Rails, then they aren't even trying.
What's disappointing is not that Mr. Lerdorf doesn't like Rails (though his reasoning could be better), but that he doesn't even seem interested in it or why people get so excited about it.