He is right in saying that PHP is fast. In recent benchmark that we did at my company, mostly between PHP and .NET, i was able to make PHP match .NET speed with little effort, using my own framework.
I have quite a lot of experience using PHP under heavy load, and i know for a fact that Ruby or Python are no match to it, and .net is barely better if not equal.
As a PHP developer, mainly (i also enjoy Python and C), i am aware of a lot of the problems that PHP has, but in the hand of a developer that really understand the language (attend a couple of conference from Rasmus and you'll get an idea on how to develop PHP properly, and that doesn't mean not using frameworks), PHP is really powerful and unmatchable in terms of easiness to use, scalability and speed.
I have quite a lot of experience using PHP under heavy load, and i know for a fact that Ruby or Python are no match to it, and .net is barely better if not equal.
As a PHP developer, mainly (i also enjoy Python and C), i am aware of a lot of the problems that PHP has, but in the hand of a developer that really understand the language (attend a couple of conference from Rasmus and you'll get an idea on how to develop PHP properly, and that doesn't mean not using frameworks), PHP is really powerful and unmatchable in terms of easiness to use, scalability and speed.