From: Akinori MUSHA <knu@...>
Date: 2000-10-09T21:17:49+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:5332] Re: Ruby vs PHP ?

At Mon, 9 Oct 2000 19:49:42 +0900,
Valerio Bamberga <bamberga@tin.it> wrote:
> Hi!
> I have a 'beginner' question:
> I was going to learn PHP, when I found an article (the first in Italy i
> think) speaking about this new lang: Ruby! It seems really impressive.
> I looked around and I studied why Ruby is better than Perl, Smalltalk,
> Phyton, C++, Java etc..
> but I found nothing about Ruby vs Php.
> Why?

First of all, PHP is characterized as an embedded language in HTML
documents.  Its grammar is likely to be a mixture of Perl and
JavaScript, with some Java's OO flavor.  Secondly, as it is integrated
into a web server (though it runs standalone) it runs relatively fast
and effective than CGI.  Also it is notable that it has loads of
modules that can be easily used from within PHP scripts.

On the other hand, Ruby's grammar is known to be simple, clean,
consitent and powerful than any other languages, and it is highly
extensible.  With eRuby, you can embed Ruby scripts in a HTML document
just like PHP, and mod_ruby allows you to integrate Ruby interpreter
into Apache web server.  Needless to say, there are lots of Ruby
modules available.

After all, it's not too much to say that Ruby has all that PHP has
plus yet more, although PHP is solely specialized as an embedded
language.  Ruby can be used for general purposes, as well as some
specialized purposes.  You can look around the Ruby Application
Archive to see how big potential Ruby has.


Despite all above, you can still try and evaluate both PHP and
mod_ruby + eRuby combo to compare, and add a section to "Compare Ruby
with Other Languages" paper. :)

Hope this helps.

-- 
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Akinori -Aki- MUSHA aka / (_ /  ( (__(  @ idaemons.org / FreeBSD.org

"We're only at home when we're on the run, on the wing, on the fly"