Hmm... really?

Going to take this apart, just for the record...

> In general we
> recommend that any new scripts be written using the PHP programming
> language because it's faster,

Nope:

http://www.slideshare.net/wycats/merb-camp-keynote-presentation

I'm sure it's faster if you run mod_php, and force Ruby to be run as a CGI, 
but there's nothing inherent to PHP that makes it faster.

> more secure,

Citation needed.

> and more portable than the
> alternatives.

I'm going to guess that Perl is far more portable than PHP, and Ruby can run 
in several places PHP can't (like the browser).

> However, if you want to run a pre-made script that is
> written in some other language, or you simply prefer to program in another
> language (like perl, python, ruby, tcl, etc) we support that too.

To the bare minimum...

> Unlike PHP, which is built in to the web server software itself, scripts
> written in other programming languages are run as external programs.

In other words, you run mod_php, but not mod_perl, passenger, or any of the 
other, similar alternatives.

But hey, it is nice that they at least support generic CGI. Hopefully, I could 
(theoretically) upload a custom binary to use as a bang path, right?

But no, CGI isn't really a good Ruby host, though there's probably Rack 
wrappers for it. It's also downright unacceptable if we try to do anything 
interesting, like Rails.