Your template is far less interesting than the original statement. PHP spent a pretty long time as basically the lingua franca outside the enterprise world (and even some places in it), and there are still domains where it holds that title (e.g. WordPress alone outweighs many languages' ecosystems), so the phenomenon the parent was describing applies more to PHP than to some arbitrary language you could insert into this template.
I actually agree with the original statement. PHP, for quite a few years now certainly has NOT been the language of choice for most startups, yet we still see the majority of them fail.
"and miss all of the tremendous losers who picked php and got nothing for it"
certainly applies equally across all languages in my opinion.
The grandparent of your comment suggested that, yes, these projects were lifted up by PHP's un-fancy nature giving them focus. The parent of your comment was suggesting that, basically, the companies that have succeeded using PHP aren't any more numerous than we would expect to have come out of the massive PHP userbase even if PHP doesn't offer any advantages at all.
The observation that "PHP, for quite a few years now certainly has NOT been the language of choice for most startups, yet we still see the majority of them fail" seems to be responding to a nonexistent conversation in which people were positing that startups based on other languages don't fail. Nobody here is saying that other languages magically make your business succeed.
