I’ve always known the thing had nothing behind it, and all the hype and predictions about it becoming the #1 platform and dethroning Java would come to nothing.

Now Scala, on the other hand, now THAT’S a rocking language (on the JVM of course) 🙂

There isn’t any „crash-o-matic” caused by Ruby or Rails themselves. You’re quoting Twitter crashes – ridiculous, really. It’s so obvious that I don’t want to comment on this any more – but I can tell you for sure that you should not blame neither Rails nor Ruby solely for this.

„But, there were a lot of holes in Ruby”

To go with your polemics: You mean holes on sense of security holes of PHP? 😉

„Crucial libraries and functionality that PHP’rs took for granted, the Ruby guys could only dream of”

Ah, missing features. Bloated core & friends.
Please just compare the functionality and quality(!) provided by RubyGems and Rails plugins to your beloved PHP PEAR… I just don’t need to say anymore, do I?

„Or they could patch it up with some C code. Ouch!”

Ouch. For ignoring PECL and that facts, that 1.) writing C code is sometimes annoying but not indictable and 2.) the PHP guys do more than the Ruby guys 😉

Last but not least… even if Rails is the killer app of Ruby – you shouldn’t compare them with PHP in a single sentence.
Compare Typo3, Drupal, Symfony (ha-ha) with some Rails applications instead and have a separate look at PHP and Ruby. And last but not least – go to GitHub and browse some Rails related code (including the various plugins). You’ll see that high quality coding with evolved patterns (finite state machines, nested sets) is made so easy due to a great community and the availablity of great plugins. As easy as PHP enables someones „webdesigner nephews“” to blow up the web with their PHP crap.

The above blog post aside, my belief in PHP goes way beyond the core language; I constantly blend business considerations along with nerd considerations.

… I think that perspective is lost on most programmers.

For example, I think PHP is much easier for web designers to learn than Ruby or Python and I think that the PHP community has a few key products out there that are supremely useful to web designers who want to take their skills/solutions to the next level. I am talking about:

– wordpress
– drupal

etc ..

So I look at PHP as being a stepping stone, a compromise for those who want to implement some dynamic capabilities into their sites BUT who may not want to become application developers. That said, with MVC frameworks like Zend, CakePHP etc … PHP also gives users the ability to write sophisticated applications.

I hope that makes sense.

Stefan

Ok, so maybe the hammer/screwdriver analogy is a bit too far fetched. Instead, let’s just say that Ruby is like testing. For awhile there, everyone was saying how great TDD was, but now people have realized that it’s time to get to work and quite fooling around with all those pesky tests. Pure logic (and we are all programmers, right) dictates that writing code = more lines of code = more time spent on the same functionality. In fact, I’ll bet the only developers who still write tests think that if you drop a heavy hammer and a light screwdriver from a roof at the same time, they would hit the ground at the same time when it’s obvious that the heavier object would drop faster.

To be honest, you could also replace “PHP” with “Windows” and “Ruby” with “Linux”. Linux used to seem so cool, but everyone has gone back to windows. Everyone know Linux isn’t really stable and certainly isn’t ready for the desktop. Yeah, free sounds cool, but come on, we all know you get what you pay for.

If you’re not able to pick up on it yet, I’m being completely facetious (and if you’re not familiar with that work, it means I’m kidding!!!!). Maybe the people around you have gone back to PHP (or not using tests, or developing on winblows), but that doesn’t mean the rest of the world is following your lead. While I’m sure you’re a wonderful programmer and we can all learn a lot from you, your opinion is being presented as fact – but it is indeed just an opinion. It does not reflect my experience at all – in fact, most shops I come into contact (ours included) use PHP because of legacy reasons – most have either expanded to using other languages, or have abandoned PHP altogether.

One more point – as much as you think that PHP is “king” of the web, Java is far more popular, has far more libraries, and can do things that PHP “guys could only dream of “. Does that make Java better than PHP? By your standards, it does.

I appreciate your comments.

One point about the article that keeps getting missed is that I was talking about the past … I was just considering why Ruby had not taken a larger position in the market by now. And for me, one of the big reasons is the early issues related to Ruby that I mention.

Like Ruby, PHP has also evolved a lot from it’s earlier days with frameworks like Zend, and CakePHP along with changes to the core language that we see in PHP 5.3. These changes, have made PHP much more powerful IMHO.

Stefan

As far as your comment: “crucial libraries and functionality that PHP’rs took for granted, the Ruby guys could only dream of.” I don’t know what functionality you think is missing. But even if there is something missing we now have JRuby and JRuby on Rails which has access to all of the Java libraries, so I would say that PHP is missing quite a lot compared to JRuby.

PHP is still very common because it became mainstream before Ruby did, but it didn’t become so widespread overnight, and neither will Ruby. People and companies are resistant to change and infrastructures have already been built up around languages like PHP. That is why companies still use COBOL. But languages like Python and Ruby have not stopped growing in popularity and will continue to grow because Ruby with frameworks like Rails and Sinatra are just easier to work with than PHP. I speak from years of experience using both languages. There is much less hype now around Rails because it is not as necessary because people know what it is now and I see people tacitly adopting it constantly.

I appreciate the sensible comment.

Stefan