From: Peter Szinek Date: 2007-11-09T01:25:31+09:00 Subject: Re: Language Popularity - PHP vs Ruby? Hello, > The Ruby community really needs to calm down about this language > superiority thing. I'm new to Ruby, and I've been hanging out on this > list for the past month or two. I'm not sure if you guys realize how > many of your emails are anti-some-language or comparing Ruby's > popularity to the others. It's really a turn-off. It's like an insecure > woman looking in the mirror asking you if she looks OK. "Of course!," > you say. "You're beautiful!" And then she asks you again and again... Though I am trying to avoid (language) flame wars or anything related to them, I really have to disagree here. The above paragraph holds for the right-wing activists of the Rails party, but definitely not for Ruby in general. Most of the people here are coming from Java, C#, PHP and other languages, not necessarily leaving those behind. I have seen some serious Java (as well as other language, or language-agnostic) questions answered here without bashing or pointing out how X sucks. I tried to ignite a Java vs. Ruby flame war once (in the favor of Ruby of course), and I was kicked in the *ss very quickly by quite a few guys here (not necessarily Java fanatics, just normal coders pointing out that language flame wars are pointless and Ruby doesn't need to prove it's superiority over anything), then the thread died off. Of course that doesn't mean that emails like the one starting this thread do not come up from time to time, or that someone doesn't start some spontaneous bashing etc. However, in general, I find the Ruby mailing list the friendliest one if it comes to superiority proving (and a lot of other things, too). Individuals will always have different levels of 'insecure-womanhood' as you put it and a lot of other things as well, but in general, the Ruby community as a whole is definitely not like that. >> I see .php pages all the time. (Almost) all the webshops use >> them (yuck). Loads of blogs use php...Back to www.langpop.com for >> querying top 3 "jobs wanted" >> notes, PHP and SQL is among them (rank 3 / rank 1). >> Yuck yuck yuck...PHP also wins on del.icio.us and in fact is only beaten >> by _JAVASCRIPT_ ! > > PHP code can also be beautiful if written correctly. That's true for assembler code, too (though it definitely requires different glasses than those of an average Java/C++/PHP/Ruby programmer) and possibly for just any language out there. Proponents of Ruby are arguing that PHP is not OOP (a frequent reason for Perl guys to come over, too) which makes some advanced techniques quite hard to implement (like Ruby's metaprogramming capabilities etc.) and ... well I am starting to get into details so I am better switching off. Of course as we all know, all these languages we are talking about here are Turing complete, which basically means you can accomplish the same stuff in any of them. However, I guess you won't argue that it's a different feeling to code in asm, C, Perl, PHP, Java or Ruby for that matter. Rubyists are the most productive and feel the best when programming in Ruby. This is a very subjective thing, therefore it doesn't make too much sense to attack each other or argue over it (it's like bashing Chivas Regal on the Jack Daniels mailing list). If in your case the sweet spot is PHP, all the power to you. After programming in ~10 languages, I am staying with Ruby for now, until something better comes along. > Given the present > circumstances, it sounds to me like you'd better go learn PHP. ; ) Be sure that most of the people here have tried PHP or something similar before (or even after) their encounter with Ruby, some are even mastering it and maybe even using it further. This is not an either/or situation: you can learn, use, heck, even like more languages at once. You can stay with PHP forever, and put yet another language in your toolbox. Peace, Peter ___ http://www.rubyrailways.com http://scrubyt.org