From: Chad Perrin <perrin@...>
Date: 2007-10-03T05:13:12+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby vs. PHP

On Tue, Oct 02, 2007 at 09:54:29PM +0900, Richard Conroy wrote:
> On 10/2/07, Chad Perrin <perrin@apotheon.com> wrote:
> > On Tue, Oct 02, 2007 at 12:59:36AM +0900, Marcin Raczkowski wrote:
> > > Richard Conroy wrote:
> > > >PHP beats Rails in certain aspects; for instance if development of the
> > > >site is seasonal in nature, as opposed to continuous, the customer
> > > >is likely to be hiring as they need. The large availability of PHP
> > > >developers plays in its favour.
> >
> > PHP doesn't beat Rails at all, because "PHP" is not the same category of
> > tool as Rail.  PHP may be Ruby in some respects, and Smarty may beat
> > Rails in some respects, but saying PHP beats Rails is like saying wood as
> > a boat-building material beats a given shipyard (which happens to make
> > all its ships out of steel).
> 
> Read my response again - the high availability of PHP developers suits
> certain classes of customer whose web development is not continuous.
> This will change of course (probably in the next year). For this purpose,
> Rails and PHP are equivalent - tools for building dynamics web sites.

You're talking about which is more socially acceptable to a manager,
then, rather than which is the better tool for the job -- because that's
the *only* way in which the two are equivalent, as far as I can tell.  In
any other sense, saying the two are equivalent in that they're tools for
building dynamic web sites would be like saying that a hammer and a
prefab house component factory are equivalent because they're tools for
constructing homes.


> 
> > Java isn't what I'd call a "systems language".
> 
> A lot of people are. Especially on a web environment - its the language
> that can do the heavy lifting (long-lived, CPU bound processes) on the
> server.

I know that some people call Java a "systems language", but in the (age
old) sense in which I'm familiar with the term "systems language", it
isn't.


> 
> > > any examples? i know google is starting to use Ruby.
> >
> > 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).

Amazon's hiring seems to focus more on Perl than any other single
language, actually -- and has for a long time.  As such, while the amount
of dynamic language usage may actually be increasing, I think one might
better represent the situation by saying that Amazon has used dynamic
languages to a significant degree for a long time.

That's "long time" in Intarweb years, of course.

-- 
CCD CopyWrite Chad Perrin [ http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
MacUser, Nov. 1990: "There comes a time in the history of any project when
it becomes necessary to shoot the engineers and begin production."