From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2007-10-02T23:27:21+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby vs. PHP

Richard Conroy wrote:
>> News to me.  Last I checked, Steve Yegge actually ported Rails to Rhino
>> (JavaScript) because he wanted to use Rails but Google wouldn't adopt
>> Ruby (they have a strict policy about what languages their developers are
>> allowed to use at Google, as far as I'm aware).
> 
> Yeah, thats the post I read too. Certainly the google idea factory contains
> a lot of people who know languages outside of the google language policy;
> but AFAIK, production code still has to be written in the big 4.
> 
> Amazon however are using increasing amounts of Ruby and dynamic languages
> in production code. However Amazon is in a rather unique situation wrt to
> code maintenance (Steve Yegge blogged on that one too, a while back).

This thread has gone on so long that I've forgotten the original 
*business* question that was posed. But I *do* remember that it *was* a 
business question, and not a linguistic one. Therefore, I think that the 
Google and Amazon experiences, both of large web enterprises that 
started small(ish) are highly relevant.

As you point out, each business has different needs, as will the 
original poster's. And in the end, those are what we need to be looking 
at. So ...

1. I've forgotten exactly what Matz has said about Ruby in the corporate 
world -- perhaps someone here (even Matz) can repeat that. But Rails 
clearly *does* have a corporate presence. The last time I checked, there 
were very few "pure open-source non-corporate" Rails projects around, 
vs. a number of highly-publicized corporate ones.

2. The LAMP stack is a major force in web applications. I'm not quite 
ready to say, "Nobody ever got fired for deploying an RHEL LAMP web 
application", but I think you have to be pretty close to that.

So I think a home-grown non-Rails Ruby solution is a non-starter here 
for a number of reasons. It's not "Ruby vs. PHP", it's "Rails vs. PHP".