From the perspective of the "average" professional programmer with a CS degree the vast majority of all programmers, even those who get paid to do it, are rank and utter beginners. Most programmers cannot solve fizzbuzz. Most programmers don't grok recursion, and have trouble with iteration from time to time. If you were to look at a graph of # of programmers within different skill level bins the "beginner" bin would outweigh all the others by a significant margin.
That's why you can replace PHP with RoR, you need to replace PHP with something that out PHP's PHP, but is based on sounder principles so that in the important cases where a beginner is climbing up the skill ladder or a system originally created in a "beginner language" grows or becomes sufficiently advanced they won't hit a brick wall where they need to migrate to an entirely different technology in order to progress.
