Two quotes of interest. The first, some patently-false FUD: James Gosling (nasty website) at Sun's World Wide Education and Research Conference: PHP and Ruby are perfectly fine systems but they are scripting languages and get their power through specialization: they just generate web pages.

The second, a rather insightful bit of pragmatism from Bill Gates (via lesscode): There's only really one metric to me for future software development, which is—do you write less code to get the same thing done?